Explain like I’m European.
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Mri tech here.
The machines I run cost $3 million each. That’s just the machine, not the infrastructure around the machine, which includes super cooled helium at about $30,000 a tank, I assume very specialized electrical equipment to deal with the incredibly High voltages, and a troupe of very expensive, highly skilled maintenence people on call 24/7.
Each coil costs anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000– that’s the thing that wraps around the body part that we’re looking at.
So it’s not enough to just have a machine you also have to have: a hand coil, a foot coil, a body coil, a head coil, a shoulder coil, a breast coil, a spine coil. If you get more specialized scans or people with certain implants, you need *other*, more differenter coils and hey guess what they’re more expensive than the standard version.
Two weeks ago we had, to put it in the maintenance workers terms, “the thing that regulates a cooling thing” get stuck in some sort of way that required a new part. This part was about 400 lb and cost about $1,000 itself but cost slightly more than that to overnight ship it here from Germany. This is very small fix.
Last year we had the main gradient coil go bad on one of our scanners, and all our managers and even the usually loose lipped maintenence people refused to give us any sort of ballpark on cost.
Those are the big expenditures as far as I know. The smaller ones include–
us, the techs who run them, at about 35-60$/hr,
an on call nurse or radiologist to deal with contrast reactions should they occur,- idk what their hourly is,
gadolinium contrast which is about $30ish a milliliter, as far as i know, each patient getting 1 ml per 10 kilos. So is 60 kilo person will get 6 ml, at about 120$.
Eovist is more like $40 per milliliter and the rate is two times that, so a 60 kg person will get 12 ml.
So yeah the overhead is *a lot*, and these are very complicated very dangerous machines that are kind of always breaking because we are running them all day everyday, and this is Healthcare so we have to stop the second anything goes a little bit wrong to keep things from going a lot of wrong.
And because the overhead is so much and the liability is so high and there are a finite number of these very complicated machines, they’ve kind of been monopolized by extremely huge Healthcare entities that can charge whatever the fuck they feel like.
I would actually be super interested to see a cost breakdown because Imaging and MRI in particular makes Healthcare corporations *so much God damn money*.
Radiology is where the money’s at.
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