Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

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Insane wait times is the greatest myth about Canadian health care.

Everyone has some friend or distant relative that has had to wait some outrageous time for something one time on the internet though.
 
Joe Shlabotnik said:
If you actually die of old age the MRI must not have been particularly important, no? I would LOVE to die of old age before getting an MRI.

How long is the average wait for urgent MRIs where cancer is suspected, etc?

Edit: My sarcasm detector may be broken. (That's twice this week, I need to bring it in.)



Oh this one's easy to answer. We do.
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meh, we just declare bankruptcy and push that cost to everyone else.
 
Same problem as many industries. The demand is inelastic due to the subsidized price. They can charge $1000 because insurers need to cover MRIs and patients don't care what it costs since the insurance company is paying for it (even if ultimately the cost comes back to everyone). You see the same problem in education. As long as I can get easy unlimited student loans, schools can keep increasing tuition price. Housing bubble; same thing. Even cell phones.
 
sangreal said:
Same problem as many industries. The demand is inelastic due to the subsidized price. They can charge $1000 because insurers need to cover MRIs and patients don't care what it costs since the insurance company is paying for it (even if ultimately the cost comes back to everyone). You see the same problem in education. As long as I can get easy unlimited student loans, schools can keep increasing tuition price. Housing bubble; same thing. Even cell phones.
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I just added up all my loans..... $179,000 borrowed. After it's all repaid - $318,000.....
 
Impeccable said:
Insane wait times is the greatest myth about Canadian health care.

Everyone has some friend or distant relative that has had to wait some outrageous time for something one time on the internet though.
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lol for real, people exaggerate like crazy.

Most people generally do not have to wait that long. I personally have never really waited much at all.
 
I had a strange numbness in my right ball and went to get an ultrasound of it. I got an appointment after seeing my doctor within a week, and seeing the doctor + going to an ultrasound doctor and letting him ultrasound my junk cost 40$. In MERRICA, I guess it would've been an even $1,000, and I would never have done it, and I would never have been able to figure out that
there was nothing wrong with my balls
. And the doctor would never have noted some swelling near the head and foreskin, only for me to say that the Major had already been at the front-line today, followed by a high-five.
 
At some point won't it be in the financial industry's best interests to have single payer healthcare?

Medical bills are driving more and more people into Chapter 7 bankruptcies, which means the credit card companies and banks don't get their money from those people, no?

I have lost all faith in our politicians. The only hope for change comes from one despicable, powerful, well connected industry fighting a different despicable, powerful, well connected industry.
 
When are the quasi-rightists going to go into this thread arguing that this doesn't matter because the U.S. has the best healthcare in the world and that we subsidize France's healthcare?
 
Impeccable said:
Insane wait times is the greatest myth about Canadian health care.

Everyone has some friend or distant relative that has had to wait some outrageous time for something one time on the internet though.
Click to expand...

Well, just as an example, what would you think is a reasonable time to see a specialist? Say my GP refers me to an ENT because I've perforated my eardrum, and the soonest appointment is three months? Is that acceptable?

Because the appointment's "free", is that, like, lightning-quick for a specialist appointment?
 
Flying_Phoenix said:
When are the quasi-rightists going to go into this thread arguing that this doesn't matter because the U.S. has the best healthcare in the world and that we subsidize France's healthcare?
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"If it wasn't for America, there wouldn't be a France to have wonderful healthcare"

Something like that
 
IndieJones said:
Well, just as an example, what would you think is a reasonable time to see a specialist? Say my GP refers me to an ENT because I've perforated my eardrum, and the soonest appointment is three months? Is that acceptable?

Because the appointment's "free", is that, like, lightning-quick for a specialist appointment?
Click to expand...

That seems quick, it's usually closer to six months for a specialist referral (in Canada).
 
IndieJones said:
Well, just as an example, what would you think is a reasonable time to see a specialist? Say my GP refers me to an ENT because I've perforated my eardrum, and the soonest appointment is three months? Is that acceptable?

Because the appointment's "free", is that, like, lightning-quick for a specialist appointment?
Click to expand...

It's not acceptable. That's why when these problems occur the Canadian system tries to, and generally does, fix them.
 
IndieJones said:
Well, just as an example, what would you think is a reasonable time to see a specialist? Say my GP refers me to an ENT because I've perforated my eardrum, and the soonest appointment is three months? Is that acceptable?

Because the appointment's "free", is that, like, lightning-quick for a specialist appointment?
Click to expand...

My daughter is being referred to an ENT due to possible hearing problems and on-going issues with her ability to suck-swallow her milk without it being thickened. She's a baby(7 months) so maybe she'll be "rushed" but my pediatrician told my wife that we'll probably be seen in two weeks.

Being a teacher my wife needs to know the appointments a bit ahead of time due to planning and we've been seeing so many other organizations and specialists and nothing has been unreasonable to any degree, in fact the ENT would be the longest we've waited.

My wife had the possibility of BRCA-2 after her father got breast cancer. We waited two months for the screening.
 
dave is ok said:
"If it wasn't for America, there wouldn't be a France to have wonderful healthcare"

Something like that
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"The U.S. also has more money than them in median income than any other nation in the world. So just put that money toward some awesome healthcare. No that is not comparing Apples and Oranges. Most of the French live below the U.S. poverty line."
 
How common is the practice of purchasing travel medical insurance when visiting the States? I never have, and my friends who frequent New York for work haven't either. I'm beginning to think this might be a seriously careless mistake.
 
radioheadrule83 said:
It is AMAZING to me that anyone on any side of the political aisle thinks that is acceptable. Medical aid in a time of need should be unconditional if we want to consider ourselves an altruistic people..
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Heh, instead politicians put all their energy in fighting abortion because of christian altruism. Maybe it's me, but opposing universal health care seems a lot more unchristian to me.
 
Aeonin said:
My girlfriend had bad stomach pains a couple years ago, we weren't sure but thought it may be something. We went to the hospital for about an hour, the doctor did a quick 15 min check, decided it was nothing - and charged us $900.

My mother had to go into the hospital for a check up, they offered to pick her up in an ambulance (non-emergency). They never told her it would cost $800.00, till afterwards.

I'm completely fucking tired of our USA bullshit health care system.
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Damn, and how far was the hospital?

My dad had to pay $50 for an ambulance, which isn't too bad.
 
Joe Shlabotnik said:
If you actually die of old age the MRI must not have been particularly important, no? I would LOVE to die of old age before getting an MRI.

How long is the average wait for urgent MRIs where cancer is suspected, etc?

Edit: My sarcasm detector may be broken. (That's twice this week, I need to bring it in.)



Oh this one's easy to answer. We do.
Click to expand...


http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/products/Wait_times_tables_2011_en.pdf


Reporting for diagnostic imaging scans is more limited than for other priority areas. In the five provinces providing MRI scan information (up from three provinces last year), waits for half of all patients ranged from 31 to 77 days. Waits were longer for an MRI scan than for a CT scan—the typical patient (50th percentile) waited between 7 and 22 days for a CT scan. This is a priority area where no pan-Canadian benchmarks have been developed (see the figures in parts G and H and Table A2).

Lots and lots of data on all sorts of wait times for different procedures in Canada....
 
Kak.efes said:
How common is the practice of purchasing travel medical insurance when visiting the States? I never have, and my friends who frequent New York for work haven't either. I'm beginning to think this might be a seriously careless mistake.
Click to expand...

It depends on how long you're going to be there. When I visit for a week or less I don't bother, but when I'm staying for an extended period I time I tend to pay for it.
 
genjiZERO said:
truth

healthcare in the US is a joke. It could be cheaper but the government has to decided to be hands off. It's hard and not be cynical and blame this on special interest and lobbying.
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I don't know if government involvement would necessarily make it cheaper. Just look at the rise of college tuitions. Government loans are easy to get and universities know this. That plus other factors doesn't help keep costs down. I don't know how to fix it but I don't think just having government involvement is the solution.
 
Funky Papa said:
what the fuck

This thread just redoubled my interest in health insurance packages for travellers/tourists. A couple of years back I had some awful belly ache that made me fear an apendicitis. I was in New York at the time. I don't want to imagine the size of the bill had I go to the hospital.
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I had my appendix removed while on holiday in Florida a couple of years ago. The bill came to $16,000. Fortunately I got insurance for the trip and it didn't cost me squat.
 
So as someone who doesn't follow American politics what's the problem with government healthcare (ObamaCare)? The impression I get is that people don't want it because it's unAmerican...but is there something inherently flawed with it or is it just politicians being politicians.

I'm aware that any answer is probably more complex or long than can be summed up in a quick and easy post...
 
Stabbie said:
Heh, instead politicians put all their energy in fighting abortion because of christian altruism. Maybe it's me, but opposing universal health care seems a lot more unchristian to me.
Click to expand...

They only pick the pertinent aspects of Christianity to suit their goals.

"Why should your neighbour pay the same pay the same for healthcare as you if he's never sick?" Nanny state/government interference in free market/personal freedom or some other such bullshit excuse.
 
Windu said:
I don't know if government involvement would nessarailly make it cheaper. Just look the rise of college tuitions. Government loans are easy to get and universities know this. That plus other factors doesn't help keep costs down. I don't know how to fix it but I don't think just having government involvement is the solution.
Click to expand...

allow student loans to be wiped out in bankruptcy. That'd lower the costs pretty quick
 
MRI machines cost $2-5 million. Good luck paying for them, along with the expertise needed to analyze them, at $100-300 a pop. There's a reason why the waiting lists for MRI's and other expensive imaging/diagnostic tests are much longer outside of the US (like 1-2 days versus 1-2 months for non-emergencies) - because providers can't afford to procure more equipment or hire more physicians due to the artificially low price of compensation for such services set by the government.

A single state in the US has more MRI machines than all of Canada, and we have nearly 5x as many per million people. There's a reason for that, and it isn't simply because we get to charge more for it here.

The superficial and biased analysis re: healthcare in the US on this forum is amusing. This is an incredibly complex, multifaceted issue. Reciting platitudes and acting like a single payer system is a panacea is a joke. That said, I am not a proponent of the extant system, nor of completely free market healthcare, which would be disastrous for a number of reasons.
 
The thing is, though, that the money is going to all the wrong places. Pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers apparently have VERY high profit margins, but the hospitals - the ones that are actually providing the services - don't have very high profit margins at all. That's one of the major problems with our health care system - you can't just go "let the government/Medicare/whoever negotiate prices lower" because often, that will do more to harm the actual health care providers than the ones reaping all the profits.
 
Fixed1979 said:
So as someone who doesn't follow American politics what's the problem with government healthcare (ObamaCare)? The impression I get is that people don't want it because it's unAmerican...but is there something inherently flawed with it or is it just politicians being politicians.

I'm aware that any answer is probably more complex or long than can be summed up in a quick and easy post...
Click to expand...

Some people don't want to be forced to pay because they are invincible and will never require health care. Others think it would be too expensive to implement or shouldn't be handled at the federal level.
 
Loki said:
MRI machines cost $2-5 million. Good luck paying for them, along with the expertise needed to analyze them, at $100-300 a pop. There's a reason why wait lists for MRI's and other expensive imaging/diagnostic tests is much longer outside of the US (like, 1-2 days versus 1-2 months for non-emergencies) - because providers can't afford to procure more equipment or hire more physicians due to the artificially low price of compensation for such services set by the government.

A single state in the US has more MRI machines than all of Canada, and we have nearly 5x as many per million people. There's a reason for that, and it isn't simply because we get to charge more for it here.

The superficial and biased analysis re: healthcare in the US on this forum is amusing. This is an incredibly complex, multifaceted issue. Reciting platitudes and acting like a single payer system is a panacea is a joke.
Click to expand...

We also have 10x the population to help bring the cost down and much larger gdp. Medical equipment should not be bough to turn a profit but to break even over the course of its life. high tech apparatuses are the bain of HC in the US. these devices rarely improve the outcome or the quality of the care in a huge number of cases where if preventive was cheaper it would not have been a problem in the first place.
 
Krauser Kat said:
We also have 10x the population to help bring the cost down and much larger gdp. Medical equipment should not be bough to turn a profit but to break even over the course of its life. high tech apparatuses are the bain of HC in the US. these devices rarely improve the outcome or the quality of the care in a huge number of cases where if preventive was cheaper it would not have been a problem in the first place.
Click to expand...

I definitely agree that a greater emphasis on improving the access to, and affordability of, primary care is paramount. But to say that diagnostic equipment rarely improves outcomes is completely false, as anyone in the medical field will attest to.
 
Yep, straightforward exploitation. If you want to pay reasonable health care costs, you have to organize and take it. Corporations, which have taken a greater and greater role in the providing of health care goods and services, are not going to avoid exploiting citizens in need of health care services out of the goodness of the hearts they don't have.

The government must step in and set prices. This is essentially what a single payer system does. It bestows monopsony power on consumers (through their government) and enables them to dictate prices to providers instead of vice versa. The best part is that, since health care is not a market (as the OP's article surprisingly explained), not even capitalists can object. Ultimately, only charlatans can object, and they can be safely dismissed as cranks.
 
Fixed1979 said:
So as someone who doesn't follow American politics what's the problem with government healthcare (ObamaCare)? The impression I get is that people don't want it because it's unAmerican...but is there something inherently flawed with it or is it just politicians being politicians.

I'm aware that any answer is probably more complex or long than can be summed up in a quick and easy post...
Click to expand...

I can only speak for myself, but the problem I have with it is that it doesn't appear the solve the problem of why health care is so expensive. It also doesn't solve the problem of why health insurance itself is so expensive. I think Sangreal said it well with the following "Same problem as many industries. The demand is inelastic due to the subsidized price. They can charge $1000 because insurers need to cover MRIs and patients don't care what it costs since the insurance company is paying for it (even if ultimately the cost comes back to everyone). You see the same problem in education. As long as I can get easy unlimited student loans, schools can keep increasing tuition price. Housing bubble; same thing. Even cell phones."

The healthcare law is mostly about removing the "pre-existing conditions" ability to deny insurance (will increase health insurance costs as it will mean insurance will be required to cover more people with disabilities) and also allows children to be covered under parents insurance for longer which isn't really that terrible. Plus it requires everyone to have insurance.

What I think needs to change is we have to break the relationship between the employer and the insurance provider. We need to put individuals in charge of their health care and their health insurance so they can start making better decisions regarding it.

Right now in the US the individual is NOT the customer of health insurance, and thus the health care provider (hospital, drug company etc.) the employer is. Because of this there really isn't actually a free market, if YOU don't like your health insurance your best option is find a different job.

Yes there are individual plans but they are very expensive because the competition is very limited. The other issue are all the requirements the government places on insurance companies to cover. Again those decisions should be left up to the individual, if they want a plan that covers psychiatric care then let them get that policy, or if they want chiropractic coverage let them buy it. Instead the government mandates that all policies cover all kinds of stuff that not everyone wants / needs.
 
LordCanti said:
Did they give you gold bars when you got out of the machine?
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Negative, and they didn't even find what was wrong. A year later and over 50 symptoms I was finally diagnosed. Lyme Disease.....ugh, what a nightmare that was. Grant it both of my legs had gone numb so they were checking for MS.
 
Loki said:
MRI machines cost $2-5 million. Good luck paying for them, along with the expertise needed to analyze them, at $100-300 a pop. There's a reason why the waiting lists for MRI's and other expensive imaging/diagnostic tests are much longer outside of the US (like 1-2 days versus 1-2 months for non-emergencies) - because providers can't afford to procure more equipment or hire more physicians due to the artificially low price of compensation for such services set by the government.

A single state in the US has more MRI machines than all of Canada, and we have nearly 5x as many per million people. There's a reason for that, and it isn't simply because we get to charge more for it here.

The superficial and biased analysis re: healthcare in the US on this forum is amusing. This is an incredibly complex, multifaceted issue. Reciting platitudes and acting like a single payer system is a panacea is a joke. That said, I am not a proponent of the extant system, nor of completely free market healthcare, which would be disastrous for a number of reasons.
Click to expand...

Hrm, yeah. You can if you raise taxes. Or if you can get away with privatizing WELL BEING. It's really not complicated, and we've actually ALLOWED it to become so.

Anyway, I'd be interested to find out what margins vendors/manufacturers are making off of an MRI machine, to keep with the example.
 
Loki said:
MRI machines cost $2-5 million. Good luck paying for them, along with the expertise needed to analyze them, at $100-300 a pop. There's a reason why the waiting lists for MRI's and other expensive imaging/diagnostic tests are much longer outside of the US (like 1-2 days versus 1-2 months for non-emergencies) - because providers can't afford to procure more equipment or hire more physicians due to the artificially low price of compensation for such services set by the government.

A single state in the US has more MRI machines than all of Canada, and we have nearly 5x as many per million people. There's a reason for that, and it isn't simply because we get to charge more for it here.

The superficial and biased analysis re: healthcare in the US on this forum is amusing. This is an incredibly complex, multifaceted issue. Reciting platitudes and acting like a single payer system is a panacea is a joke. That said, I am not a proponent of the extant system, nor of completely free market healthcare, which would be disastrous for a number of reasons.
Click to expand...

Thought you said pancetta and was insulted you brought a wonderful Italian ham into the discussion.
 
From a Finnish POV, there are 3 things in US that are really fucked up upside down: healthcare, school system and student loans.
 
richisawesome said:
No I don't.

We don't earn enough, and she's on tax benefits due to her health. We are pretty much tax exempt, and we still get free healthcare due to being a UK citizen.

christ, the bums on the street still get treated at my local hospital. they don't pay taxes.
Click to expand...

Wonderful. So everyone else in the UK who pays taxes paid for it then.
 
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