Explain like I’m European.
In: Other
If your car only burns $30 worth of gas per week, why do you also need to pay for insurance and a car loan?
to pay back the cost of the machine.
when a hospital buys an MRI machine, that is easily over 1 million dollars in cost. for both the machine itself and building out the special mri room.
Meaning if they only charged people 100 dollars to use it, it would take them 10,000 mri’s to payback just the cost of the machine alone. That is YEARS worth of MRIs. unsustainable.
This is why rural hospitals are struggling. They can’t buy good equipment because they don’t get enough use to justify the cost. But that means people choose to travel further to hospitals with newer/better equipment when they can.
The cost of an MRI, and every other product or service offered by hospitals in the U.S., is set by the hospital negotiating the price with insurance companies.
I’ve gotten at least 7 or 8 MRI, and none of them cost even nearly that much. The last one was a total of $700 between what insurance paid and what I had to cover combined. It was $235 for my portion.
Just did a quick Google and the average is $1325, so where are you getting this $3500 amount from? Was it a specialty procedure with the radioactive dye and all of that? Some of them can be fairly pricy, but the vast majority are under $800.
There are a few things most posters left out.
Insurance companies have a whole lot of policies which drive up costs. First, they insist on getting discounts, but because hospitals can’t afford to (or don’t want to) discount from the real prices, this creates fake inflated prices that are often listed on bills as the official cost. But insurance companies don’t pay this much. And people who pay for healthcare without insurance normally don’t pay this either. A lot of the numbers we see for healthcare don’t really exist.
Then there’s a rule for insurance companies called the 80/20 rule. Insurance companies are legally obligated to spend 80% of the money they take in on actual healthcare. Their overhead, advertising and importantly- profit, needs to come out of the remaining 20%. So it actually benefits them to keep costs high. That allows them to justify high premiums, so the total pie is bigger, so that 20% that they don’t have to spend on medical care is bigger. They don’t set the prices directly, but they’re the main buyer, and hospitals receiving money aren’t going to complain the price is too high.
And finally, the poor and uninsured. Hospitals must treat people who come in with emergencies, regardless of their ability to pay. And a fair amount simply can’t. But they use doctor time that has to be paid for, supplies that have to be paid for, a share of machine time and expert time etc. Because the hospital knows they’ll never get paid for all those things, they have to distribute the costs associated with those services to their general overhead, which is part of every other charge.
You see, by refusing to provide universal coverage, the US creates a situation where we all have to pay for poor people’s healthcare anyway. But we pay when they’ve put off going to the hospital until it’s an emergency and much more expensive for all of us, and the poor people end up with much worse health outcomes because they waited and can’t afford followup care. And they die in debt so their whole family is wiped out. If we paid for simple coverage for all, like most developed countries, it would almost certainly cost us less when you factor everything in.
It’s more than That to operate an MRI magnet, significantly in some areas.
They use a large amount of electricity, they have an expensive service package (warranty), techs make anywhere from $40-135 an hour. Some exams take 1.5-3hours. The radiologist read isn’t even always included- some places have contracts with off site companies that do the reading or pay locums to read at home. The contrast isn’t terribly expensive, and many exams don’t need it. The cost can depend on who ordered it, the structure of the medical group providing the service, your insurance, the type of exam, etc etc…
But the real answer is 100% profit in the US.
My advice is an MRI is an extremely useful diagnostic exam and if/when you NEED one it is absolutely worth it.
But PLEASE!!! Ask questions, many providers use it as the only way they can manage to come up with ANY diagnosis. That’s malpractice and dishonest.
And DO NOT get sucked into the miserable “follow up” or “surveillance” cycle many doctors will try and get you into. 75% of the time it’s absolutely unnecessary, and done to minimize liability, maximize profit and find more shit wrong with you to “ FOLLOW UP”
On with another exam or different modality.
Source: 20 year MRI tech
capitolism gone bad. take blood tests for example. with insurance it may cost you $20-75 with co-pay, yet most of the tests quite literally actually only cost $5-15. One big giant money racket
Because profit. In australia a non-subsidised MRI is between 250-1k (for the majority of common scans)
when insurance became legally mandatory, hospitals realized that they could charge whatever they wanted and the insurance would cover at least some of it. even if it’s only 10% of what they charged, its still infinitely more than it’s worth.
It costs like 70 dollars here in Brazil, at least in my small city near the Amazon forest. The machines are the same as yours, they all cost more than 1 million dollars. So, the answer is that your healthcare system is fucked.
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