There are medical grade gases, so you are correct. Oxygen is a good common example where you get the oxygen bottle for welding and there is the medical grade for respiration so filling ballons with the more expensive grade of Helium would not make sense.
When you look around at woodworking machinery there is nothing not made or assembled from parts from Asia so there is no choice. The days of buy British went with the demise of the british manufacturing industry when someone pulled the flush.
There have been several threads with regards to asian goods and quality, the reason we get a bad impression of say Chinese quality is because our machinery companies like Record and Axminster are in control of the price they wish to pay to maintain their profit margins so it is us who are wanting lower cost goods that are influencing the quality. To highlight Chinese technology, if anyone saw the news the other night where the Chinese were playing so called war games around Taiwan you must have seen that there military is on par with anyone else when it comes to technology, replace the chinese people and you would have thought it was an American war game.