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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My gut says this is a communist troll but I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt.
The machines are privately owned by the hospital and /very/ expensive. Using anything deprecates it, hence why cars lose value based on mileage. The machine uses resources to operate it – electricity if nothing else. Also, the staff to operate the machines are well paid professionals.
It’s sort of like paying for a taxi ride. Why does a taxi cost money? The driver already owns the car, right, and you’re paying for far more than the just the fuel and some maintenance.
Sure, the taxi driver bought the car, so why are they charging so much? Well, say the driver bought the taxi for 50.000 dollars. And say that taxis last 10 years after which they need to be replaced. So in 10 years, the driver needs to have another 50k to buy a new taxi. For a full work week, 40 hours/week, 50 weeks per year, that’s 2000 hours of driving. 10 years x 2000 is 20.000 hours. So in 20k hours, the driver needs to make 50k dollars just to replace the car when it is too old to drive.
So for every hour the taxi driver runs his machine, he needs to save 2,50 dollars on top of all of the other running costs, which is just included in the price. And ideally, they’d save 5 dollars per hour, 2,5 to pay down the old taxi and 2,5 to buy a new one without having to take out a loan.
Some machine have a limited lifespan, like 10,000 scans. Everytime it is used it is closer to needing to be replaced.
I mean sure, it does cost money in upkeep, operation, parts, etc.
But I don’t charge my friends what it would cost for a new toilet every time they flush mine.
OP do you own a car?
If you drive 10,000KM in the car, is it free because you own it? Or do you need to pay for fuel, a service, maybe new tyres/brakes?
Because machines break down. Using any machine causes wear and tear on the parts which will eventually have to be replaced; a machine is usually rated for some number of uses or some number of hours of active use, so you can divide the total cost of the machine by the number of uses to figure out how much it costs each time it’s used. An MRI machine can cost well above $1 million, and if it’s rated for, say, 10,000 uses before it has to be replaced then each use costs $100. That also doesn’t count the cost of the electricity, the wages of staff, etc just to operate it.
Every medical device is engineered to a vastly higher standard. The risks of anything going wrong are so substantial. So the equipment it self is super expensive.
The staff who operate the machine are all paid, and again the risks of anything going wrong are substantial so you have redundant staff. Again adding operational costs.
The enviroment has to be impeccably clean so between each use the equipment has to be sanitized meaning that the length of its usable service is not just the time for your procedure but also the time for some one to clean it before the next procedure.
The maintenance on specialized medical equipment is not done but general maintenance staff at the hospital, instead the company producing the equipment has specialists who travel to various hospitals to conduct routine maintenance,
Have you ever owned a car? Was it free to operate it after you bought it? Or did it cost money to operate the machine in the form of gasoline, insurance, maintenance, etc.?
If you had a 10 million dollar machine that can only do 1000 scans before it needed a 100,000 dollar part replaced, would you waste time scanning pets and fun stuff?
Perhaps it’s still being paid for, operation costs include things like capable staff, repairs, electricity etc. then there is a return on investment equation in there somewhere I’m sure that dictates what is a good use of the machines time and what isn’t.
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