If you ever get cancer... Maybe it's just that I lucked into getting the most aggressive oncologists, but on more than one occasion I was sent to get an MRI or CT on the spur of the moment. There were times when it was scheduled out as well - but along the lines of "come back in six months; we'll schedule the CT for the week before".

(But I know I was lucky - my oncologist could order a river to reverse itself and it probably would.)

Your profile and your user name seem to imply you’ve changed the direction of your career? Glad you’re alive, by the way.

Yeah. There's a finite amount of resources and a literally never ending avalanche of patients. At some point they're going to have to make a cold calculation.

I don't really know how it works in the US but here in Brazil it's actually pretty easy to order laboratory tests and imaging studies. There's taxpayer funded public health care but it can't handle the demands of the entire population so people would rather pay for the ultrasound or CT scan than wait two years for the government to provide it. An ultrasound costs about $30, an MRI costs about $150 and the price of a CT scan is somewhere between those two.