What is the cost of taking x-rays? The cost of film and the ink to print the image.?

Question

I'm doing a research & need to find out not what the clinic charges you (the patient) but the base cost to the clinic. Thanks for your answers!!!

Answer 1

When I was a practicing technologist, we fiddled and fooled around trying to determine those costs, and it was nearly impossible.  Being the NCO in charge of my Army hospital clinic, I was the one who had to re-order supplies.  I knew how much a box of film cost and how many sheets of film were in a box - so determining the cost of a single sheet was easy.  But there are so many items that figure into the overall cost that determining exactly how much a single chest x-ray cost, for example - well, you could arrive at a close estimation, but not an exact figure.  See, to run an x-ray clinic there's a whole lot more expense you have to cover - the cost of electricity, which as you can imagine, is quite high.  The cost of heat and the cost of chemicals and the cost of salaries and benefits, the cost of the building - rent/lease payments or mortgage payments - insurance, records storage and retrieval, license fees, mailing costs, phone bills and the like are just some of those expenses.  You even have to factor in the cost of your janitor's services, and that'll be high due to the nature of what goes on in your clinic - it's different when your janitor has to clean up a bunch of barf off your equipment when the kid that did the barfing happens to have a serious, contagious illness.  Cleaning supplies and disposal of same is going to be different than it would be for the janitor in your local grocery or dry goods stores. So - to determine the cost of a single x-ray - you're never going to come up with an exact figure.  

Lastly - what it costs the clinic and what the clinic can expect to recover can vary dramatically.  What your insurance company is willing to pay and how much of the difference you are capable of paying often does not cover the clinic's cost - so they have to make it up somewhere else, and that means someone else is going to pay a heck of a lot more for their barium e***a than you might be asked to pay for yours.  There's really no such thing as a not-for-profit health clinic of any sort - x-ray, dental, orthopedic, obstetric - because if you don't make a profit, you go out of business.  

The real world sucks, don't it?

Answer 2

There's no ink. Doctors look at the "negative." These days, film itself is giving way to digital imaging, so the costs include largely the amortization on the equipment: the x-ray machine itself, the processor/digitizer, the computers, etc. Plus, of course, labor costs.

Answer 3

Film and developing (there is no 'ink') costs represent maybe 10% of the retail price charged by the clinic.

Additional expenses the clinic must cover through the retail price include:

1) rental cost of the X-ray room

2) cost/depreciation of the X-ray machine, automated developer / film-processor, X-ray cassettes, etc.

3) maintanence and repair expenses

4) staff expenses

5) insurances

6) time and training for the doctor to read/interpret the films and write a summary report for the patient's chart

7) a profit.