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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

That’s not an unreasonable charge for an MRI and I’d argue that you got off quite lightly. You can’t diagnose many of the potential problems shoulders have from an x-ray but a good clinical examination will catch many of them, with an MRI for confirmation. Labral tears would be an example of this.

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For a second I read your comment as liberal tears, and had to do a double-take. :)

Speaking to the 500$ charge, are you saying that is a typical cost around the world for a MRI? Is there something about the machine's cost that justifies this or are you just saying that a 500$ charge is typical in the american system?

And here I thought my last 120 EUR MRI was very expensive... (in France, of course)

That’s impressive. The purchase price and running cost are high. Then there are expensive labour costs (doctor, probably 2x techs and admin/reception staff. Often a nurse is around for more complex procedure too). Peripheral equipment isn’t cheap, with defib, contract injectors, RIS/PACS, reporting stations etc. Scans are slow relative to CT and x-ray so I have no idea how they make that work. Did you pay the whole bill? I am an MR tech.

No it's not an unreasonable charge. The amount I had to go through and the necessity of it was the question.

I got charged with two things - XRay and MRI. One was enough, apparently... And I wasn't in any critical condition to an XRay immediately.

It's 2-3x more than you would pay in a regular civilized country... it speaks volumes about the US system that you think it's not an unreasonable fee.

I’m not sure you are correct in that - MRI scanners are expensive to run as they are rarely as low priced as you are suggesting. See link below which is a little old but gives a spread of prices. Note that the prices cited i this thread is less than half the US average.

Another factor that is relatively rarely discussed is the quality. You can do a fast scan or a good scan. That’s inherent in how MRI works. A good gynaecological, cardiac or liver scan takes about 45mins, and there isn’t much you can do to improve on that as you are limited by metabolic activity (eg liver or heart contast wash-in and wash-out). If corners are cut here diagnosic quality will be reduced.

I regularly see scans that are of such poor quality that they are initially mistaken for the survey scans/scouts that we use to localise the patient in the bore. They are generally from places that you would intuitively avoid for healthcare, but not always.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/312020/price-of-mri-diag...

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