Posted on 07/05/2017 6:28:50 AM PDT by robroys woman
MRI SCANS AT $395.00 - Advanced Patient Imaging offers an affordable solution to medical imaging services that's designed around the patient. We offer a fixed, all inclusive price of $395.00 for all MRI scans. This price includes the scan, contrast (if ordered), a copy of your exam on a CD-ROM and professional interpretation from a board-certified radiologist within 24 hours. Advanced Patient Imaging developed our business model centered on low fixed costs. We do not have excessive operating or overhead costs like most large hospitals or other imaging centers. This allows us to offer individuals who may have no insurance, high deductible or co-insurance plans an affordable medical imaging option without sacrificing quality of service. Advanced Patient Imaging is committed to providing our patients with the best service at the best price. We employ a friendly, professional, caring staff with years of experience and specialty training. Our radiologists are board-certified by the American Board of Radiology. We utilize the same state-of-the-art medical imaging equipment that you will find in hospitals and imaging centers throughout the country.
In Minnesota, a company sold Groupons offering cut-rate prices for MRIs to screen for risk of stroke.
That kind of online deal hasn't made it to Cincinnati, but you can walk in to a storefront medical office and get a magnetic resonance imaging test for $395 – about one-sixth the cost of the test in a hospital.
Low-cost alternatives for big-ticket diagnostic tests are the latest signs of how Greater Cincinnatians are changing the way they buy and use health care. As shifting pressures reshape the medical economy, people are relying more on their shopping skills and less on doctors to reduce expenses that health plans no longer cover.
Advanced Patient Imaging, open just two months in a small office complex near Eastgate Mall, offers MRIs for a flat $395, including the test interpretation by a specialist. MRIs can detect cancer, ligament damage and other problems with soft tissue that escape X-ray.
The company does not take insurance. But a customer will get a receipt for filing with an insurance company to have the cost applied against a plan deductible. Customers don't need a doctor's referral unless they want to file a claim with their insurance.
The point, say the company's founders, is to provide a low-cost alternative that avoids the paperwork hassle of insurance and a hospital's built-in costs that are passed through to consumers. Plus, with coverage deductibles running to $7,500 a year, consumers end up paying out of pocket anyway for MRIs and other medical tests.
"The hardest thing about this," said David Durham, clinical coordinator for Advanced Patient Imaging, "is getting people to embrace the belief that they are their own health-care advocates."
"This is countercultural," said Dave Driggs, chief executive officer.
Typical local cost for hospital MRI: $2,400.
Jaime Conner of Batavia, who recently took her teenaged daughter to the clinic for an MRI, is delighted at the price for such an important diagnostic test.
"I love the choice being given to me," she said. "For years, we just assumed you have to go to the hospital to get things done. I like the idea of choice. It lets me decide how much I'm going to spend."
In the past 30 years, medical science has multiplied the tools that can guide health care decisions. The tried-and-true X-ray test that reveals bones has been joined by the computed tomography or CT test, which uses X-rays to create cross-section images of the body, and the MRI, which uses magnets and radio waves to reveal soft tissue.
With an MRI, a patient dons a hospital gown to lie on a flat surface that is wheeled into a tube encircled by the magnet housing. As a magnetic field is generated, radio-frequency waves are directed at the patient, who must be still for the length of the test, sometimes up to 45 minutes. The procedure generates detailed images of inside the body.
Because the equipment expense is so high – an MRI machine costs about $1 million – only hospitals have had the buying power to purchase them. The federal government has found that the national average price for an MRI is about $2,700, not including the radiologist's reading.
The average in Ohio is $2,400. In Kentucky, it's $2,530.
Tack onto that price the separate cost of a radiologist who interprets the findings and writes a report: an extra $150 to $300.
As the cost of the machinery has dropped, some tests have moved out of the hospital setting, particularly ultrasounds and mammography. Durham, an ultrasound technician for more than 20 years, and Driggs, a former executive with Hospital Corp. of America, together have been running a mobile ultrasound unit in Cincinnati for six years.
With the cost changes driven by the Affordable Care Act, the two men realized that medical testing was becoming an entrepreneurial opportunity. Fliers inserted into print editions of The Enquirer, for example, advertise services of Life Line Screening of Independence, Ohio, which puts ultrasound testing in mobile units. Consumers can get ultrasound screenings for five conditions for $149.
In Plymouth, Minnesota, west of Minneapolis, a company called MRI Pathways sells MRIs for a flat $499, including the radiological interpretation. The company last year experimented with Groupon, the daily online discount deal, which created such a high demand for MRIs that the offer was discontinued, a spokesman said.
'Keep it simple, stupid'rule in play
Inside the Clermont County office of Advanced Patient Imaging, consumers can also get $125 echocardiograms to check the heart and $95 vascular sonograms to look for potential blockages in veins and arteries.
In the parking lot stands a separate, specially designed facility for the MRI, which the company leases, "exactly the same machine you'd find in a hospital," Durham said.
A consumer can come to the office, pay $395, get the test and receive a radiologist's report within 24 hours. Driggs said the contracted doctors who read the company's MRIs are board-certified radiologists licensed to practice in Ohio.
Other companies around the country offer low-cost MRIs in a price range, depending on the body part examined, and some of them take insurance. Durham and Driggs said what makes Advanced Patient Imaging different is that they have figured out the lowest possible flat price for an MRI – and they have disengaged it from the confusion of insurance coverage.
"We follow the KISS principle – keep it simple, stupid," Driggs said. "There are no additional costs. When you buy a car, you shop around. That's what we're trying to offer in the medical arena."
About a month ago, Jaime Connor's 14-year-old daughter Kasey fell during volleyball practice at Williamsburg High School. Her knee swelled, and the pain increased. Connor grew concerned and worried about getting her daughter medical care.
Connor and her husband are self-employed and do not have health insurance due to political objections to the Affordable Care Act. Connor and Durham know each other through their children's sports activities, and Durham suggested Connor bring over her daughter to Advanced Patient Imaging.
All Connor knew about an MRI was that it involved a giant tube "and it was very expensive." But she gladly paid $395 for her daughter's test one morning, and by dinner time, the family had the radiologist's report with the good news that the injury was not serious. She called the care and followup "phenomenal."
The experience "has made me think outside the box," Connor said. "I think people just assume: Hey, I can go anywhere because the insurance has got it covered. People could be saving thousands of dollars if they had this knowledge."
Ck this clinic out - https://surgerycenterok.com/
All procedures are cash and up front!!
bookmark
No, it’s the law.
And I refuse to play. My solution was to keep my taxable income low enough that the 8% rule applied, just as the solution for a lot of small businesses was to STAY small to protect them from the mandate.
A law that causes that sort of activity is seriously flawed.
Single payer health systems will lead to them deciding if your 11 year old child lives or dies not you.
‘Insurance’ of ANY kind was designed for THE BIG STUFF - totaling your car, your house burning down, terminal cancer, etc.
‘We The People’ have been sold a pig in a poke by many entities through the years.
“It seems like very high deductible insurance combined with health savings accounts would be the way to go.”
Surely you jest! That’s Treasonous Talk, making individuals RESPONSIBLE for their own health care and budgeting for it, as well?!?!
*SMIRK*
I agree with you, 100%...and then some!
(Disclosure: I’m a Vet, so I get my care through the VA...but I didn’t always!)
Totally. I live in the hidden world without insurance. We are members of
Liberty Health Share and we are
Mostly cash pay patients so we use medical services carefully, the way a family pays for food, transportation, vacations. We’re
Set for
Catastrophic and we do due diligence to find cheaper
Ways to have tests and other health services. There is a whole world
Of Us out there. The doctors and providers love it and we love it. Google self pay patient and just start discovering. You can travel out of state for procedures too and save $.
Reality is refreshing. This communist single payer stuff is total BS.
Our system encourages waste. You spend hundreds a month, for years, not needing any (significant) medical care. Then, when you need something, neither you or your doctor are spending their own money - you’re both spending a 3rd parties money (insurance company). Of course, the “give me the works” attitude kicks in, from both patient and doctor. The patient wants the best care possible and the doctor can be held liable if they don’t (and something happens).
This entire 3-way system, which is really a 4-way system when you include lawyers, does nothing but encourage high costs. Of course, nobody feel sorry for the insurance industry because any denial of coverage makes them look like monsters. If they didn’t though the costs would go up even faster.
This low-cost MRI, along with LASIC, are great examples of lowering cost via competition when the consumer spends their own money. Somehow, we need to inject this approach into medicine in general. Maybe have insurance companies provide a percent based reimbursement of health services purchased, so it’s in my best interests to shop around.
I pretty much agree. However, you said, “Then, when you need something...”. I would change it to “IF you need something”. And often, I don’t need what they are selling. e.g. if I get cancer, I’m not going for Chemo. I’ll go for something like the Gerson method, which is just a few thousand dollars. And since I have friends that have been cured of stage four cancer using that, I’m good with it.
Chiropractors have been medical marvels for me as well. And I had high blood pressure so the doctor prescribed pills. I took two and threw the rest away. That was seven years ago. I changed my diet and my blood pressure is completely normal.
Fact is, most of the expensive stuff the “AMA approved” community wants to do is not something I’m interested in. Not all, but most. It would be dumb for me to get insurance to cover stuff I wouldn’t even want if they thought I needed it.
At 63, the only pills my wife and I take are over the counter pain killers. Meanwhile, our insured peers and contemporaries are ALL complaining and concerned about the cost of their prescription drugs. It’s like we live in two worlds and their world is trying to force itself on us.
That is not how it works in a free country. This isn’t the old USSR. Yet...
Single Payer lie = MULTI TAX PAYER Healthcare
What diet do you use for Normal Blood Pressure??
In a word, “healthy”.
We raise our own chickens for eggs, don’t overeat, eat almost zero processed foods and very rarely eat at restaurants.
It’s fun to look at people at the costco checkout line and then compare what we see to what food items they are buying. There is usually a strong correlation.
In my case, I also don’t overdo it with salt, since it is a problem in my family, genetically.
Well, in the case of this company, they can provide MRIs cheaper for several reasons.
1. They don’t have to eat the cost of delivering illegal alien babies for free, or providing other services for free.
2. They don’t have to mess with insurance company forms and the associated billing departments and bureaucracy
3. They don’t have to mess with government bureaucracy.
Those 3 things alone will probably eliminate half the cost of providing services.
Yep. They are run like any other business in a FREE economy. i love it.
I have been preaching this for years: The single most important change for lowering the cost of health care is to require transparency so that consumers can comparative shop for services. Nearly every state has consumer protection laws that require grocery stores, retail stores, gas stations, car dealerships, etc. to clearly mark the total price and/or unit price of the items for sale so that consumers know the price before they buy and can comparative shop for a lower price if they so choose.
Prior to Obamacare, health care consumers did not have to comparative shop because most consumers only had to pay a flat co-pay regardless of the actual cost of the service or procedure, which brings me to the second most important change for lowering the cost of health care: Create an incentive for health care consumers to comparative shop by getting rid of the flat fee co-pay. Instead, set co-pays as a percentage of the cost of the medical service or procedure so that the consumer has skin in the game and a reason to comparative shop. Better yet, get rid of co-pays altogether and require the consumer to pay out-of-pocket and seek reimbursement from the health insurer.
The third most important change for lowering the cost of health care is to prohibit health care insurers from penalizing providers for charging consumers less than the negotiated insurance rate for medical care.
Glad to hear you’ve not been ensnared into the pill popping culture. I believe most of our ailments can be managed by lifestyle changes.
Over the last 2 years I’ve quit smoking, changed my diet, lost 50+ lbs, and gained muscle. I feel so much better. My back pain is gone, I have energy, I feel better mentally, and my stress level is lower. It was not without significant effort, most would rather take a pill. Until we understand biology from the atom to the genome to the behavior of every cell in our bodies, there will be snake oil products. Even today, drugs get to market by measuring the statistical differences in outcome compared to a placebo. The underlying science as to “why” is still not close to being understood.
An unadulerated source for meat is difficult to find at food stores. Canned or packaged meat has added salt, like canned ham, usually disguising it’s taste so consumers cannot detect spoiled aging.
We share in a steer with our neighbors. We’re on our fourth one.
#20 You can have 2 babies for the price of 1 with a groupon.
Just pick out an extra kid in the maternity ward on your way out.....
It not only is the best solution practically, it’s the most freedom-based (which means it’s the right one).
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