It always confused me. A hospital has an MRI or some other machine, and you hear they try to use it as little as possible to cut costs, because it costs them this or that amount per usage. But why would that be if they own it?
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You want to use it more, the more you use it the less it costs per scan. That can add up to real $$$ over the life of a machine. In broad terms industrial and complex machinery (factories, planes, MRIs, buses, etc) should be used consistently. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the most obvious is that the more you use it the less it costs. Particularly with machines that have fixed maintenance cycles. If you have to drop the engine off a plane every year no matter what, then it is cheaper if you have flown it 365 days that year than if you flew it 100 days that year. Similarly, an MRI is going to need to be maintained at fixed intervals, so if you scan 1000 patients between those intervals it is better than only scanning 100 patients.
It seems counterintuitive because we aren’t used to thinking about things in terms of fixed and variable costs. Variable costs are things like electricity, those costs are going to go up and down depending, but you can smooth that over time. Fixed costs are things like installing the thing, regular maintenance intervals, etc. So, what you do is figure out how much each scan costs if you pay for the electricity and maintenance. What happens is the more you use it the less each scan costs because your maintenance doesn’t change, but the amount per scan that must go to maintenance drops.
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