• nichos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Healthcare is one of the heaviest regulated industries in the US. Less regulations would be better-you could go to a store, see a menu board and order an MRI with upfront pricing.

    • van2z@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hospitals or healthcare insurance is so regulated?

      you could go to a store, see a menu board and order an MRI with upfront pricing

      Can you explain this? From what I understood, there is no upfront pricing because insurance companies are slow to provide a price. If there is no insurance company involved, then hospitals would be able to tell you the price.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      MRIs are always going to be expensive. Just how it is.

      Anything with exotic physics and high precision requirements (MR, CT, PET, Nuclear Medicine) is already expensive just in raw material… There’s also shipping costs. All of the engineering, R&D, that goes into it. Safety and regulatory testing.

      Actually, most medical devices have razor thin profit margins. All of the money is made back through service contacts. Because adding another million to recoup engineering costs would make an MRI even more inaccessible.

      Lot of efforts by the big players to make things cheaper and easier to produce. But MRI for example will require a LOT of helium until we get better superconductors. Anything radiation will always require a lot of lead. Anything nuclear will require specialized isotopes and detectors.

      Machines will never be cheap. But the insurance companies and the US healthcare model sure as hell make things worse.

    • TheGod@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ah the classic “this wont work, you see bc USA has shown that and free market always wins”

      Meanwhile the rest of the world have several different but similar blueprints showing how it works much much better. But americans must always go a different route and ignore as if nothing else exists.

      • nichos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The US system has it’s problems, obviously, but it also has the best treatments in the world. People come from all over to get treatment in the US.

        Money is a great motivator for “big pharma” to develop treatments.

    • minimar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Healthcare is one of the heaviest regulated industries in the US

      Okay, now compare to europe.