Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart

By ALEX BERENSON and REED ABELSON
NYT

A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart?

The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue.

Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests. And they expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.

Dr. Rosenblatt worried that he and other doctors in his clinic would feel pressure to give scans to people who might not need them in order to pay for the equipment, which uses a series of X-rays to produce a composite picture of a beating heart.

“If you have ownership of the machine,” he later recalled, “you’re going to want to utilize the machine.” He said no to the offer.

(Continued here.)