Joe, the issue is not how much you pay for that MRI. The issue is that for every one person they catch with something that is real, they send hundreds running to the medical system for workup which costs much much more than $400. Ever notice how the Lifescan type companies offer no followup or workup for what they find? Their response is "Go see your doctor." People who are getting these scans are getting expensive workups that expose themselves to medical risks for what we call "incidentalomas". Fact is, most people will have a small nodule in their lungs or whatnot as they age. These things are not cancer but people end up going through biopsies because their Lifescan found a "tumor".
Just another reason why our medical costs are high...
And I am sorry about your friends, however when you are talking about population based screening for diseases, you don't deal in anecdotal incidents...
http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/yourhealth/Articles/a2003-08-01-bodyscan.html
"Save a life—your own!"
So proclaims an ad for high-tech "full-body" scans at a clinic in New York City, one of hundreds of imaging centers popping up in shopping malls and office buildings around the country.
The sales pitch is enticing, prompting more and more of the health-conscious to sign themselves up for powerful X-rays that can reveal cancer, heart disease and other potential killers before symptoms appear.
But whether such intensive testing of healthy individuals with no sign of disease is necessary—or even wise—is strongly disputed by medical experts.
Some doctors endorse full-body CT (computed tomography) scans because they can find trouble spots early, when they are most treatable. "We can save lives," says Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., whose Dallas Cooper Clinic was one of the first to offer the scans. "With the full-body CT scan, we can pick up heart disease and cancer at their earliest stages."
But much of the medical establishment—including the American Cancer Society, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and American College of Radiology, among others—does not endorse scans, full-body or otherwise, for people without symptoms. They say the tests often find harmless irregularities that lead to unnecessary, expensive, sometimes invasive procedures.
The scans pick up meaningless abnormalities, such as scars from long-healed infections, cysts and tangles of blood vessels in the liver, especially in those over 50, says Robert J. Stanley, M.D., past president of the American Roentgen Ray Society. "In a large percentage of the cases, these things are not worthy of being evaluated further."