There’s two sides to this coin. On the one end, you have insurance companies refusing to pay for anything because the modern industry is just six scams in a trench coat.
But on the other, you have doctor’s offices where the physician literally leases an MRI machine to the tune of several million dollars and then has to run a certain number of patients through the scanner every year or lose money. That’s because the MRI patent is held by GE and they can charge 10-100x markups on hardware that is fundamental to modern medicine.
Its the same with diabetes treatments. Insurance companies will try and refuse service or kick people off their policies if they are at risk. But then pharmacy companies will sell $3 of insulin for $75, then kickback a chunk of the balance to judicial/congressional bribes in order to guarantee the cash flow.
At some level, the only insurance companies that can survive in such a market are the ones that say “No!” to everything. The even-remotely-ethical firms just get fleeced by the for-profit industry until they get bought out or go bankrupt. That, or you’re Medicare/Medicaid and you have an infinite wallet backstopped by the US Treasury. You don’t care if you’re paying multiples of whatever any other clinic anywhere else in the world would charge on an enormous population of poor and elderly patients, because you have an unlimited money cannon to mow it all down with.
GE isn’t the only one who makes MRIs. The other big players are Siemens, Philips, United, and to some extent Canon, Fujifoto, and Hitachi.
No, that’s really how much it costs. The margin on MRI machines is terrible. I’d like to see you do it cheaper… “Just” build then supercool magnet for superconduction for 3T of homogenius magnetic field, build coils that handle KW of RF/gradients that can fit a human comfortably without artifacts, build the high power and precision circuitry to transmit and receive said RF, then control that equipment accurately and safely.
Super easy, off-the-shelf stuff.
Oh, and you can’t use any ferrous parts, nor can your power supplies generate any noise.
The other big factor in cost is supply chain. Everything has to be tracable. So the supply chains have to do a lot of paperwork, inspection audits, since a defective part can kill someone.
I’d go one further and say a National Health System fixes all this. Rather than paying a guy to pay a guy, you just have publicly financed clinics and hospitals. This is the traditional way of building up medical infrastructure, btw. City hospitals used to be the norm. We only entered the era of corporate consolidation when we sold off our public infrastructure for a song during the neoliberal turn of the 70s and 80s.
There’s two sides to this coin. On the one end, you have insurance companies refusing to pay for anything because the modern industry is just six scams in a trench coat.
But on the other, you have doctor’s offices where the physician literally leases an MRI machine to the tune of several million dollars and then has to run a certain number of patients through the scanner every year or lose money. That’s because the MRI patent is held by GE and they can charge 10-100x markups on hardware that is fundamental to modern medicine.
Its the same with diabetes treatments. Insurance companies will try and refuse service or kick people off their policies if they are at risk. But then pharmacy companies will sell $3 of insulin for $75, then kickback a chunk of the balance to judicial/congressional bribes in order to guarantee the cash flow.
At some level, the only insurance companies that can survive in such a market are the ones that say “No!” to everything. The even-remotely-ethical firms just get fleeced by the for-profit industry until they get bought out or go bankrupt. That, or you’re Medicare/Medicaid and you have an infinite wallet backstopped by the US Treasury. You don’t care if you’re paying multiples of whatever any other clinic anywhere else in the world would charge on an enormous population of poor and elderly patients, because you have an unlimited money cannon to mow it all down with.
Very uninformed take, its almost laughable.
GE isn’t the only one who makes MRIs. The other big players are Siemens, Philips, United, and to some extent Canon, Fujifoto, and Hitachi.
No, that’s really how much it costs. The margin on MRI machines is terrible. I’d like to see you do it cheaper… “Just” build then supercool magnet for superconduction for 3T of homogenius magnetic field, build coils that handle KW of RF/gradients that can fit a human comfortably without artifacts, build the high power and precision circuitry to transmit and receive said RF, then control that equipment accurately and safely.
Super easy, off-the-shelf stuff.
Oh, and you can’t use any ferrous parts, nor can your power supplies generate any noise.
That’s like, senior design level stuff amirite
The other big factor in cost is supply chain. Everything has to be tracable. So the supply chains have to do a lot of paperwork, inspection audits, since a defective part can kill someone.
*cough* single payer fixes all this *cough*
Sorry, cough has been acting up. I should go see a doctor with a MRI about that…
I’d go one further and say a National Health System fixes all this. Rather than paying a guy to pay a guy, you just have publicly financed clinics and hospitals. This is the traditional way of building up medical infrastructure, btw. City hospitals used to be the norm. We only entered the era of corporate consolidation when we sold off our public infrastructure for a song during the neoliberal turn of the 70s and 80s.