For starters, just what is medical imaging? Medical imaging is the method of creating and using anatomical images for purposes related to disease finding. It often incorporates elements of radiology and other expensive elements, and thus this is likely to be the reason for its often high costs. Medical imaging can be crucial to various elements of medical analysis, such as in the case for detecting strokes. The American Stroke Association has offered statistics on this, stating that “Every 45 seconds, someone in America has a stroke. Every 3 minutes, someone dies of one” (1). Therefore, is it wise to be cutting a medical practice that has been known to detect strokes?

Through a stroke can occur in anyone, they most often occur in the elderly. Since those that are most eligible for Medicare are the elderly, what does a move like this mean? If doctors are afraid to use medical imaging for fear that their pay will be cut, will they be putting many elderly patients on the back burner? Will there be an increase in the prevalence of strokes nationwide? After all, medical imaging techniques like ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are considered by the American Stroke Association to be crucial in differentiating between different types of strokes and thus helping to prescribe appropriate treatment protocols.

Without getting into a political skirmish about health care proposals in the United States, the main argument being directed to the public on this issue is the fact that a cut in the pay of associated doctors may prevent overuse of this technology. Who then determines what overuse is? Will it be the public and the doctors, or the insurance companies and the big medical industries? Will be a combined mixture of inputs from both sectors? Without the elements and motives behind this truly clarified, how can anyone know just what will be considered overuse of this technology? Seemingly, many doctors are opposed to the idea and are a bit afraid of this proposal.

Strokes are just one example of the widespread use of medical imaging technology, and there are bound to be many more examples of the technology being used to assess and prevent diseases. The fact of the matter is that medical imaging technology has saved lives, so the question should be raised as to who is going to determine what overuse means. Though some have speculated that tests are often performed in hospitals just so doctors can get money, this tends to be a cynical and often muddied idea. After all, such an idea can be assigned to a doctor who performs an ultrasound to check for liver damage. If no liver damage is found, a case can be made that the test need not have been performed. It truly sounds a bit skeptical, and there seems to be flaws in this logic that are often overlooked.