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."
LOL! Reminds me of Fred Brooks programming book, where he wrote that “Bearing a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
Then they make you sign that you’ll pay when you get the bill. If they can decide the amount of the bill ex post facto, then you should get to decide whether to pay in the same manner.
There are just not enough of these alternatives to make a big impact.
People have been conditioned to believe the hospital or big clinic are a monopoly, that there are no alternatives. The markup for a lab suite is 1000%. In a normal competitive market you or I should be able to do this for 500% and still be quite profitable and happy with our profit. Indeed, someone could be quite happy to do it for 250% profit undercutting costs by approximately 75% from the norm.
Why isn’t it done? Becuause the regulators and the medical emprie have created and protect their monopoly.
Eisenhower got it wrong. It is not the vast military industrial complex we should have feared. It is the VAST MEDICAL COMPLEX that has consumed us and takes 1/4 of our economy and yet still never has enough.
The cool thing is that we can still opt out, which is what my wife and I have done. Thing is, we understand that life is a very brief time and that yes, we will all die. And with hard times comes learning - like when my wife’s first husband died of leukemia in his late 20’s, without insurance, leaving her with three kids under the age of six.
She and I are now 63 and living the happiest days of our lives, and those three kids are doing great.
We don’t need the government to live happy and joyful lives, other than the military that protects us from without and the police and laws/courts that protect us from within. And the latter is becoming a bit of an enemy these days.
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