As absurd as that question sounds, according to a new book, it’s true, in a roundabout sort of way. The Decision Tree by Thomas Goetz, recently excerpted in the Washington Post, points out the skyrocketing cost of CT scans:
Hospitals pass along the expense of CT scans to patients and insurers. That means they don’t experience a downside to their actions (what economists call a moral hazard). Without a downside, they just keep ordering tests: Medicare alone saw its payments to physicians for imaging services double to about $14 billion from 2000 to 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.
My father, a retired surgeon, used to tell me, “If you want to go into the medical profession, be a radiologist, don’t be a surgeon.” He explained that radiologists make a lot more money and spend less time (if any) in the operating room. (The median salary of radiologists is about $361,000.) And these days most of the scanning analysis can be done in the office or at home. On the downside, radiologists will never experience the joys of performing a bowel resection. (As the pathologist in Fletch says, “You never really get used to the smell, do you?”)
More to the point, however, computed tomography (CT) is the brainchild of Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer who worked for EMI (Electric and Musical Industries), and as a result of his efforts won a Nobel Prize in 1979. None of this would have been possible if not for the gobs of money coming in to EMI from one of its musical clients, The Beatles. “It was so much money that EMI almost didn’t know what to do with it…. Flush with money broken out of teenagers’ piggy banks, EMI let Hounsfield pursue independent research,” writes Goetz.
And to think they could’ve spent the money on solving the mystery of Paul McCartney’s untimely death.
