COLD LAKE MEDICAL DEVELOPMENT FUND SOCIETY Form

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U.S. healthcare spending is astronomical. In 2019, it was $3.8 trillion or $11,582 per person. That accounts for 17.7% of the nation's gross domestic product. Much of the recent progress in medicine has involved high-tech diagnostic tests and therapies. Many of these innovations are spectacular, but if we focus on them at the expense of cheaper and possibly more cost-effective interventions to diagnose and prevent illness. The huge cost in our healthcare system come from a variety of sources. Routine diagnostic tests can be incredibly expensive. A magnetic resonance imaging or MRI machine can cost anywhere from 1 million to $3 million. And the cost of a single scan can be $400 to $10,000, depending on the area of the body that needs to be examined. Some of the more revolutionary treatments such as gene therapies to cure or alleviate rare and deadly childhood diseases are staggeringly expensive. In 2019, the FDA approved a cellular therapy called Zolgensma for a rare genetic disease, sp