Just a blog - Debbie Singer

Untrue. If this were so, someone else could spend $3 million on an MRI machine and $150,000 a year on wages for qualified technicians, offer them at $500 a pop, still be cheaper and still make a killing (nearly $220 extra per use above what France charges). But let's look at the obstacles against that simple price-lowering mechanism: 1. Legal obstacles, only the ridiculously over-licensed are allowed to do this. And I'm not talking about the technicians, we'd pay them the same as they got elsewhere. 2. Who is the purchaser? Not you. You'd never want to go to such a place, for fear that cut-rate MRIs were somehow inferior quality. 3. Not the insurance company. They don't give a fuck... they just raise premiums on everyone at the end of the year by $450 (even if they never get an MRI), and this is a far easier way to account for the costs. No need to send a team of 50 highly-paid middle managers to negotiate with a similarly-sized team at the hospital/imaging-center, for what will end up thousands of man-hours. 4. A gigantic media monstrosity poised to slander them into the ground if somehow they skipped all the rest. That's right, maybe it'll be Fox News destroying the competition for their rich friends who make money in health care, or maybe it'll be Olberman ranting about how they're using unqualified people and putting grandma at risk of undiagnosed cancer... but my money's on both. So instead of simple economics forcing these places to undercut each other, the constituency wants to jack off to socialist fantasies in the hopes that we can just have the government pretend prices can ever be lower without actually removing those obstacles. Think about it before you vote me down... let's assume $280 is the true cost. We'll set the price tag at $550, meaning each MRI nets $270. We'll do 3 an hour, though I'm sure that they can be done faster. We net $810 an hour, every hour... and we can run this from 7am until 7pm if we like. $68,000 a week... nearly $300,000 a month. We'd net $3.5million each and every year. And that's not even keeping the lights on, that stuff was included in the $280 true cost. Maybe even salaries were included, depending on just what the claims are. And to those that claim we'd just be providing sub-par service, that's bullshit. We don't have to cheat to become insta-wealthy here. If we don't have enough money to sate our infinite capitalist greed, we can use our profits to buy a second or third MRI, and earn the profits triply-fast. Ten years later we sell the business to some other greedy-but-dumber gobnobber, and retire away to a tropical island before undercutting ruins the business and makes us paupers.