Forbes magazine’s medicare piece on how medical costs increase due to corporate lobbying for CT scanning coverage that drives equipment sales, reveals the market’s reaction:
Congress: “…tried to rope in runaway Medicare costs by dramatically cutting imaging payments in outpatient settings…”
Private Insurers: “…Companies like CareCore Radiology, American Imaging Management and National Imaging Associates cropped up to do the dirty work of reviewing and rejecting imaging orders on behalf of insurance companies…CareCore’s research shows a doctor who owns his own machine is four times as likely to order a scan as a doctor who doesn’t.”
GE:”…a lot of the arguments against imaging are …read more

Forbes magazine’s medical industry piece “Cranking Up the Volume” comments on GE’s lobbying efforts for medicare coverage for CT scans enabling sales of CT scanning equipment:
“The party has gone on too long”.
Apparently, excessive coverage for CT scans has led to over doing and “over” covering the scans, thus increasing medical costs:
“Radiologist David Gruen used to spend millions of dollars to replace his General Electric (nyse: GE – news – people ) MRI and CT scanners every three years. It was money well spent because the machines were always busy.”
The economics of this is very interesting: more money for allowable scans …read more

Forbes magazine recently wrote about the medical industry in “Cranking Up the Volume“. Presumably, higher “volume” means more visibility into the processes behind medicare, medical equipment, and diagnosis. My contention is that our medical costs will go down if we can increase competition. Competition usually comes into play when information becomes available- information about services, prices, and costs of providing services. A useful comparison dealing with understanding costs of providing services is in the auto sales area; a few years ago information about dealer costs and margins made available on the internet enabled competition by allowing buyers to shop around …read more