Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkiely | Hacker News Reader

“According to Connecticut-based Hyperfine, their machine will cost $50,000, which is 20-times cheaper than traditional systems, runs on 35-times less power and weights 10 times less than normal 1.5T MRI machines.”

I believe GE came out with MRI machines a while back that were specific for limbs. This really does not seem much different other than it is on wheels and you can possibly position over a torso in a bed if it isn’t metal.

View on HN

A hospital billed my insurance $15k for a single MRI series once. This machine could pay for itself very quickly.

Lots of hospitals love to use MRI’s as a high margin business. I had a contrast MRI where my insurer was billed $20k and paid $16k.

Same MRI at a stand alone clinic is about $2k.

It’s ridiculous.

A 1.5T torso MRI costs me $260 US dollars in Mexico without insurance and without prescription, radiologist interpretation included. Salaries are higher in the US and I assume the bleeding edge tech is multiple millions of dollars. But even with those considerations, I don't think $20K is justified.

Sure, they don't have fast 3T machines, but still are useful for DIY cancer screening for the paranoid like me (for those that aren't familiar with imaging tech, MRIs don't use radiation).

In Russia torso MRI costs around $200-$300 too. Smaller exams on outdated machines could be found for as cheap as $80.

It is solely US thing that medical procedures have astronomical cost.

In Italy, my mother did a few months ago a contrast MRI (spine), directly paid in a private laboratory (outside the national service) for around 300 Euro.

Which makes sense if the machine cost is around 1,000,000, appointments were every half an hour, so, let's say they make 15 scans per day at 300 each, it makes 4500 Euro/day by 220 days/year that is around one million Euro/year.

You take out of it - say:

250,000 Euro for the machine (for 5 years)

250,000 Euro for personnel

250,000 Euro for maintenance, power, other costs

50,000 Euro for something else I don't know

And you are still ahead for 200,000 Euro/year, i.e. roughly 20% of your investment.

Brings up a point never have imagining or blood work done by a hospital if you can at all avoid it.

Especially if you keep billing insurance $15k to use it.

There is a remarkable asymmetry between physicians who take risk to read the mri and are paid a few hundred dollars and the corporate stooges who run the hospital and charge whatever they like. And yet with such a willing supply of doctors from abroad there is no end in sight.

Small models used to scan lab rats also exist (a friend does research on brain damage prevention and I was wondering if they let her use human-rated machines for murine models).

The small-bore machines they use for rodents have much stronger fields: 9.4 and 11T field strengths are pretty common. This is a lot easier to achieve in a small bore. For comparison, the “standard” research scanners for humans are usually 3T, with 7T scanners becoming somewhat more available.

That said, many universities do let people use the human scanners for other research. It’s kind of a pain to do with animals, because you’re paying $500 an hour while you scrub the room down afterward and wait for the air to cycle, but it’s the only way to scan larger animals (primates, pigs, dogs, etc).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com