The Heart Scan Scam

I can easily imagine one of those “good news bad news” jokes coming out of this.

Doctor: I have some good news and bad news.
Patient: What’s the good news?
Doctor: The results from your heart scan look great.
Patient: That’s fantastic. What’s the bad news?
Doctor: As a result of all the radiation from the heart scan you now have cancer.

This past Sunday, the front page of The New York Times featured a story entitled “Weighing the Cost of a CT’s Scan’s Look Inside the Heart.” According to the story, these CT (computed tomography) scans “expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.”

And here’s the thing, the benefits of these scans is somewhat dubious. The article claims that these CT heart scans "have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests.”

That hasn’t stopped some docs from prescribing them for their patients though. In the past year alone over 150,000 people have been given CT scans for their heart.

So why would a doc prescribe a test that may expose his patient to a cancer risk?

The answer is quite simple. Many of the docs prescribing these scans hold an ownership position in the equipment being used. A CT scanner costs around a million bucks so a doc would need to perform around 3,000 scans to pay back his or her investment.

It’s not just the docs either. Hospitals that have invested in CT heart scanners are also motivated to recoup their investment.

It kind of reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Elbert Hubbard. “When a fellow says, “it ain’t the money but the principal of the thing,” it’s the money.”