One thing this article doesn't touch on, and let's not pretend that it isn't a significant item, is access to services. If a person comes into the ER here, regardless of insurance status, with symptoms of a closed head injury, they will get a CT pretty much right away. Medical reimbursements in ERs are so low as to be unbelievable to the average person (at my hospital its roughly $0.25-0.30/$1.00). If you want to know how it works in Canada, where they pay half of what we do for an MRI, please see Natasha Richardson. In the US, there's a strong possibility that she would have been inconvenienced for a few days with a headache. They simply don't have CT and MRI in ERs in Canada or anywhere else the gov't dictates prices.

American hospitals buy so may of these machine because they want to treat patients well. No doctor that I know (and I know a lot of them) orders an MRI or a CT to make money. Making money is a side effect. We can argue about whether we need all of these machine, what the actuarial benefit of giving indigent people MRIs is, but doesn't come from a place of a money grab, at least not on the hospitals' end. If we let the government dictate prices, we will save money, but we will also lose access to some services. There's no such thing as a free lunch.