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Comment by slantedview | Hacker News Reader

Nobody gets an MRI for fun.

I do. I think it's interesting to have scans of parts of my body – brain, body fat/muscle distribution, etc. I also use them as reference for how my body changes over the decades.

(EDIT: Nothing to do with medicare or fraudulent billing. Just pushing back on the "for fun" point. I can fall asleep in those things.)

I expect MRI to be a high capex investment but low cost to run it each time. Maybe someone more knowledgeable might step in.

Of course, to play devil's advocate, using an MRI because you have it might lead to acquiring more MRI machines because of the high usage of the existing ones, I guess.

MRI techs are paid a lot of money, so I don't think it's entirely free on the margins.

I don't think there are all that many MRI machines that just sit there, unused, most of the day. There might be some hospitals that want to reserve their MRI machine for emergencies, so that it's less likely that you'll have to wait when you really need it.

I found this page here with some info about costs: https://info.atlantisworldwide.com/blog/the-cost-of-an-mri-w...

Even though they name cost of operation, energy use, cost of spare parts, maintenance and repair as expenses for running an MRI. It looks to me like the biggest cost by far is going to be the acquisition and installation. So if you've invested in an MRI machine you probably want it to be in use as much as possible in order to recoup the cost of the machine.

There could be though. That's a manufacturing problem.

I used to do MRI experiments in grad school for neuroscience.

One time, I got curious, and did some back-of-the-envelope math on how much they cost. In NYC, an MRI machine drew as much energy in 20 minutes, as my apartment did in a month.

Between electricity, keeping a superconductor cool, and personnel costs, it cost ~$100/hr in a medical facility, 20 years ago.

Sounds like a DEXA scan would be much more appropriate. Less radiation, cheaper, faster, and specificity tailored for measuring body composition. It’s like 40 bucks and five minutes.

Getting an MRI for body composition is like using industrial high precision equipment to measure the length of a hotdog

Just in case anyone else reads this and is confused. MRIs only use radio waves. No ionizing (or visible or even IR) radiation is used. The strong magnetic fields are a risk (due to interacting with metallic items embedded in the body). The contrast agents also can cause some undesirable side effects.

Ha, I knew this comment was coming. I should left it as “More comfortable” but that was too subjective

I'm a bit wary of regular DEXA due to the ionizing radiation. MRIs have essentially zero health side-effects if you're not using any contrast agents.

DEXA is definitely cheaper, but a good amount of my time spent in MRIs was due to assisting in various research and QA projects. Unless you're made of money, I wouldn't recommend that to anyone who has to pay. I wish they were cheaper...

They give them to people like they're going out of style. Why just last week I had fourteen of them myself!

that's it?

That's true. But under a fee-for-service (FFS) model, providers get paid per procedure they do. That gives them an incentive to order more testing, and generally "do more stuff."

There's also an IT angle (relevant for HN!): medical systems don't always talk to each other. Which means that maybe the patient got an MRI last month, in a different health system... but I don't have access to it in my health system, so I order a redundant one.

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