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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 1000 dollar per hour seems like a non-reasonable price

MRIs are expensive machinery that take highly-trained and well-paid technicians to maintain and operate. The imaging process takes an hour alone; start to finish, it's a two-hour process that is far from just pushing a button.

> one should have a legal right to command a MRI scan without paid analysis

I don't think there is a law, in America, prohibiting MRIs without expert analysis. But one, that's useless. And two, the people who don't think it's useless are the ones most likely to misinterpret the data and cause problems for the MRI provider.

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> Google Query: cost of an MRI in India

> Result: How much does an MRI scan cost in India? The average cost of MRI scan in India is usually between Rs. 1500 to Rs. 25000.

> Query: Rs. 25000 in US dollars

> Result: 25,000 Indian Rupee equals 321.02 United States Dollar

...so ok, there's a chance the first answer is wrong and/or there's some factor I'm missing, but assuming it isn't one must again ask the question: Why does an MRI cost $5k?

For the record, asking specifically about a full body scan did not change the price:

> Query: cost of an full body MRI in India

> Result: [...] And the full-body scan cost you between INR 18000 to INR 25000 in India.

> Why does an MIR cost $5k?

Where did $5k come from? I said a "couple thousand dollars," though looking at my e-mail it was $1,500. A 4 to 5x cost differential from India to New York City seems explicable.

$5k is a number that's been thrown around in this thread so I guess it stuck in my head.

> A 4 to 5x cost differential from India to New York City seems explicable.

Then please explain it, because you seemed to be saying that this expense was inherent to the machine and had little to do with cost of related labor. If that was the case, one wouldn't expect an MRI in India to cost 1/5th as much.

I also doubt it would be any less expensive here in south central Wisconsin than it is in New York City.

> this expense was inherent to the machine and had little to do with cost of related labor

The machines are expensive. They also vary in strength, with scanners in e.g. the Philippines and Malaysia being of considerably lower strength than is common in America [1]. (I couldn't find data for India. There are certainly no 7T scanners there; I believe most are 1.5T and below. In New York, it was a 3T.)

Between that, which might be a 2 or 3x differential between a low and high field strength scanner, and the cost differential of "highly-trained and well-paid technicians [needed] to maintain and operate" [2], 4 to 5x seems explicable.

[1] https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/6700/1/IL9.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449409

answering you next comment since HN has a lag.. I don't think american radiologist read this paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5265198/ but hey one can hope the myth that occidentals are better trained, it might be actually true who knows

Cost of living is totally different (lower) in India. Everything in the economy is far cheaper due to less regulation and precision technology.

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