Actually the maintenance costs less than $60 per patient and most of it is in autoinjector, some in coolant and checks. You're being gouged. Source: in Poland, checked the costs.

The cost of a new full size CT machine with surrounding equipment is quarter of a million USD though. Some are more expensive than others, but you can get a new good one for this much.

USG costs few tens of thousands, and maintenance is super cheap, mostly consumable gel, some $8 per patient.

MRI machines are more expensive at half million USD and $120 per patient. (cooling costs)

This includes salaries.

Hospital bed is like $12 per night, staff included.

Germany and Sweden have even better healthcare, mostly due to larger number of doctors and nurses. Not that much more expensive too. Our education and salaries don't keep up.

I‘d like to know the source of your numbers. For reasons I buy Ultrasonic gel quite regularly, and it costs me about 1€ per litre, delivered to my doorstep. If you use it for its intended purpose, I highly doubt that you use more than 0.10€ worth of gel.

Even in russia you can get MRI for $50 (depending on body part and resolution it might go as far as $300).

Possible solution to duplication: decouple tech (test labs) from doctors (hospital)

Oddly enough, it seems like tech is closer to doctors in Germany than in the US. Just about every Hausarzt (general practitioner) and every internist and ob/gyn has an ultrasound machine in their practice and uses it themselves. When I've been in the emergency room, the doctor does the ultrasound, not a technician, though nurses set up and run EKGs.

And it's all amazingly cheap compared to the US, even as a private pay patient. An overnight hospital stay is about 200 EUR, including the attending doctor's fee.

That's interesting. In the US, these things go for $10K or so. Maybe they lease them? At $500/mo if it got used every day, that's be under $20 per use.

No idea, but there's a lively enough market that I've seen older ultrasound machines at veterinarians' offices.

Vet services, by the way, do cost approximately as much as they do in the US, at least for birds.

Yeah, in the tiny town I grew up in we only had a single hospital and still had a (private) radiography clinic that was shared between the public hospital and private surgeries.

There's essentially a gentlemen's agreement between health systems and insurers to make patients pay for imaging and charge lots for it.

Some of the newest CT machines are more like $2 million.