> The tests range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on which sections of the body are scanned, and are not covered by insurance.
Even ignoring the overdiagnosing problem (I don't understand how they can determine from MRI when a cancer is a cancer; there are also benign growth and often when they are a certain size, people notice them, but how would MRI help here? Too small areas could be classified as malign; any further procedures can be dangerous - see that Dawson Creek actor recently, the cost of clinical intervention did not help), I think that medicine is increasingly becoming a "only affordable for those who have money". You can see this with regards to gene therapy too - if we ignore the success ratio, many of these therapies are impossible to acquire for Average Joe. Granted, the prices will go down for various reasons (we saw this with Moore's law and many other inventions too), but at the end of the day I feel we are stepping closer and closer to a very unfair society model - more and more superrich, but prices also go up immensely for average people. That model is not sustainable; people will be angry since this is not fair.
Even ignoring the overdiagnosing problem (I don't understand how they can determine from MRI when a cancer is a cancer; there are also benign growth and often when they are a certain size, people notice them, but how would MRI help here? Too small areas could be classified as malign; any further procedures can be dangerous - see that Dawson Creek actor recently, the cost of clinical intervention did not help), I think that medicine is increasingly becoming a "only affordable for those who have money". You can see this with regards to gene therapy too - if we ignore the success ratio, many of these therapies are impossible to acquire for Average Joe. Granted, the prices will go down for various reasons (we saw this with Moore's law and many other inventions too), but at the end of the day I feel we are stepping closer and closer to a very unfair society model - more and more superrich, but prices also go up immensely for average people. That model is not sustainable; people will be angry since this is not fair.