RCM only

On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:45:42 -0400, the infamous Leon Fisk
scrawled the following:

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:04:59 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

snip
If you want some perspective on that, check out the price of a CT or MRI
scanner and the fixed salary costs of the people who run them. Every minute
they aren't used has to be paid for by someone -- probably you.

Another rip-off. These machines are regulated by the state.
You can't just plunk a new machine down in an area. The
current providers have a virtual monopoly. They can pluck a
number out of the air and that is what they will charge for
the service. They just ran an article about CT/PET scanners
here in Grand Rapids around a week ago. One of the hospitals
without their own scanner wants the okay to bring in a
mobile unit on weekends. It will charge around half what the
other two hospitals charge. You and I both know that a
portable anything can never be run as inexpensively as a
built in something. Interesting article, see:

I helped with a bone scanner repair for a Russky/American medical
clinic up in Beaverly Hills, CA a decade back. They were just having
the place set up for a new MRI machine, and the setup alone cost them
a MIL. The excavations under the building for the machine were
interesting, though I saw it only after the crete was poured. I don't
recall how much juice that thing took, but several wrist-thick cables
were brought in for it. I'd hate to pay the CA electric bill for
running one.

The day after I worked there I watched the movie "Volcano" and the
setting was half a block away from where I'd just spent the day. Talk
about a weird type of deja vu, watching red hot lava flowing down San
Vicente Blvd., the road I was just on...


http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapi...oon_offer.html

If you enable images in your browser you can read the cost
comparison between the three hospitals.

$2.7k v $5.8k, Whew!


The people who pay for health insurance, their own medical
bills and such, have lost their high paying jobs. These jobs
are not coming back anytime soon, if ever. The people
working and running the health care system are going to have
to come back down to earth pay wise or they will soon enough
be out of work too. The average person can't afford them
anymore and insurance is not the answer. It isn't affordable
either and does nothing to rein in the runaway medical
rates...

Yeah, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't make any money.

--
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the
thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power
to revoke at any moment. -- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus