>>10810086I work in medical research, and while I agree with the general sentiment that the medical industry is ruining the humanitarian aspect of medicine via price-gouging, your understanding of the specific mechanisms that drive the cost of a $999 ultrasound is extremely naive and uninformed.
The primary reason why cutting-edge medicine continues to be prohibitively expensive is because a firm will always charge the profit-maximizing price if they're the only one that holds the patent. There is no incentive for a profit-driven business to set the price any lower than the number that will maximize their quarterly return. For inelastic commodities like insulin and epi-pens, that number can be extremely high. The only way to address this form of price-gouging is to change how patent law works, and that is not a trivial thing to do without breaking the same sorts of incentive systems that drove investors to fund drug R&D to begin with.
>price opaquenessThere are thousands of consultants all across the country who could give you an estimate for how much it costs to manufacture a given pharmaceutical product, and they'll probably be within 10% of the actual value. In many cases, the marginal cost of making a drug is already public knowledge.
But that doesn't drive the cost down because, again, if a firm holds a drug patent with no major competitors, it can charge whatever the hell it wants for it.
>We should be getting full body scanned every month like we get a haircut and it should cost the same amount as one too because of economies of scale!!!MRI machine is actually justifiably expensive to operate. Giving every person in america a visit to a radiologist every month would bankrupt the health system and probably deplete worldwide reserves of helium.