I'm not being sarcastic with this question.. Do you have any insight on how Medicare determines what prices they'll pay? I know in some cases it seems like it comes "out of a hat" but I beleive there is a review of SOME kind.

The "more MRI scanners in City X than Canada" isn't nearly as true as it used to be. The count for Canada is 222 as of June 2010 and the US has 7950 as of July 2010 (latest figures from NumberOf.net). Canada has 1/10th our population so a more accurate, adjusted comparison would say 222 to about 800. Now, other surveys say that doctors who own their own MRIs order 4 times as many MRIs as doctors who don't, but there's controversy in how those numbers were attained.

Don't get me started on DRG days... How a doctor handled my grandmother concerning DRG days should have been criminal - but that's a story for another time.

But more than anything else, let me say a sincere THANK YOU for taking the time to write what you did.