If there was medical procedure that would cost a lot in a hospital an MRI would not surprise me, it such a large powerful, power hungry, complex device I can't see how it couldn't.
I wish each person could get access to an MRI each year it would be nice to track your health visually.
The capital costs for an MRI, while large, are not the biggest part of the price. I had an MRI done in Pune (with a good machine, 3T/32 channels) for 6500rs/$130.
Labor costs are a biggie. In the US, you need to pay technicians high US salaries, in the $60-70k neighborhood from what I hear. In Pune, the technician is almost certainly poorer than 95% of Americans. The high ratio of capital costs/labor costs also causes higher utilization of the MRI - in the US, many MRI places are 9-6, I had my MRI done in Pune at 9:30pm, and someone went in after I finished.
Labor costs are actually a much bigger deal than GDP figures would suggest. High skill individuals get a much bigger premium in the US than most of the rest of the world. A top 1% person in the US gets $384k/year, in Canada only $181k.
A nit, but is this actually true? I've had 7 MRI's (5 health-related, 2 research-related) and only one of them was during business hours. I've had MRIs done at 9pm, 11pm, 1am, 4:30am, 6am etc.
1) The trucks -- a lot of times MRI trucks are driven around to various hospitals, and scheduled in advance, for non-emergent studies. These obviously get scheduled during "working hours", and then the emergent off-hours MR studies are done by transporting the patient to a higher level facility and thus might get shot whenever.
2) The whole "doctor owned imaging center" scam or "perverse economic incentive", where doctors own imaging centers and then refer a lot of patients to them, increasing the use of the technology for basically no need. These are easy to schedule during working hours, too.
I'll take your word for it, you've had more MRI's than me. But I've always had to take half a day off from work to get an MRI done.
I imagine it would also be different for a hospital MRI (which needs to be available for emergencies) and outpatient MRI centers (which is where I've always gone).
MRIs aren't much use for screening. They can't be used to diagnose many diseases at all, and for many others, their sensitivity and specificity are quite low. In addition, they produce a large number of huge, highly complex images that have to be reviewed by a human being, and it's incredibly easy to overlook something if you don't know what to look for. If I had a coffee for every time our radiology specialist has said some variant of "I wouldn't even have noticed that if I didn't know that's where the pain is -" well, let's just say, I'd find it a lot easier not to fall asleep in the radiology demonstration.
If you want one yearly screening procedure available to anyone, there are many better choices than MRIs, especially considering their high costs (even in non-US countries.)
I wish each person could get access to an MRI each year it would be nice to track your health visually.