Unfortunately, it's a matter of where you get it done. Getting literally anything done at a hospital is highway robbery. That said, i get two MRIs a year at not a hospital and it's a couple hundred dollars, not a a couple thousand. It's not cheap, but it's a about 1K expense twice a year, which you can budget for.
I feel like this is the crux of the US's issue. We have medical care deserts and for many people the hospital is the only way to get something taken care of. This is where the US is different from many other wealthy nations. We really don't get economies of scale at all. We have cities, but a lot of our major cities juet have nothing like the population of other nation's major cities.
> We have cities, but a lot of our major cities juet have nothing like the population of other nation's major cities.
I don’t think this is it. European cities aren’t that big compared to American ones. So Spokane is larger than Geneva. The problem is there isn’t much in terms of healthcare between Spokane, Boise, and Minneapolis.
That's only if you look at the population of the named cities themselves rather than the population of the city plus the surrounding populates areas.
In Geneva's case, it is composed of several different named cities/towns/etc and those taken together are bigger than Spokane plus the municipalities that comprise its urban area.
Spokane metro is 579k. Geneva metro population is 633k. So Geneva metro has slightly more people than Spokane metro. Of course, the metro areas are wall to wall (so Geneva metro is adjacent to Lausanne metro) but they both have their own healthcare systems and aren’t gaining much more from scale than American metros.
And Spokane is a small case. There is nothing comparable to the Seattle metro in Switzerland. The closest you get is Paris in France or Milan in Italy.
On the chance this may be helpful, I recently used Radiology Assist [0] to self-pay for two 3-Tesla MRIs. Each MRI cost $375 - total - and included a radiology report and a copy of the MRI images. I have health insurance. It was cheaper to just pay for it myself. Also, Radiology Assist was able to get me in on the exact day and time I wanted, on short notice.
I have no connection to the company other than as a satisfied customer.
In Canada the typical MRI waitlist time is several months outside of emergent issues. You could go privately but it's tougher than you think to pay for this, as it's not well integrated with the public system and your family GP (if you have one). I guess I'm saying, cost is definitely one factor but our exclusive public-only system has got problems too
Canada has extremely few physicians, like USA. For healthcare to work well you probably need to reform your system to get more physicians, I don't think any system works well when you have too few physicians. You can see the countries with good public healthcare has twice as many doctors as Canada and USA does.
I feel like this is the crux of the US's issue. We have medical care deserts and for many people the hospital is the only way to get something taken care of. This is where the US is different from many other wealthy nations. We really don't get economies of scale at all. We have cities, but a lot of our major cities juet have nothing like the population of other nation's major cities.