People often talk about swapping out plastic straws for other materials to help the ocean/fish and the environment, but they also complain about paper straws falling apart easily. Other alternatives that are slightly more sturdy like straws made of straw don’t seem very common.
But do we even need straws? My first reaction was that any liquid can be drunk directly from the vessel it’s in, and straws just add another level of convenience. If we don’t want to use plastic straws and the alternatives mostly suck (actually all straws suck 🤓), why not just ditch straws entirely?
This is how we end up paying for straws as medical devices. As soon as you make it a niche item the people who really need it are screwed
It’s a simple metal tube (reusable). Just because it’s niche doesn’t mean it’ll cost a bomb.
It will in the USA once insurance companies classify it as a medical device and doctors offices start billing them $500 for a straw they’ll negotiate down to $200 and now we’re paying $40 per straw after insurance
That is unrelated to normal straw usage, though. They can at any time declare that they need “medical straws”, define that only certified companies can provide them, and then demand hundreds of Dollars for them. I would not be surprised if this was already happening somewhere.
Now I hope the people affected by this hoard straws. We live in a weird world.
Straws would still be cheap, but also medical devices should be free anyways