[jacquesm]

An MRI is not some magical device, it's more like an advanced way to do tomography and interpreting the results and preparing you for the scan is non-trivial and likely will remain so even if the cost of the MRI machine drops to '0'.

So you're going to need the crew of attendants and interpreters with associated costs regardless of the price of the machine.

What cheap MRI machines will do is marginally reduce the cost of a scan, which would be a good thing but over the life of the machine it is the people that make up the bigger chunk of the cost.

Mobile MRI machines are currently truck sized, something that could be moved around in a suitcase and set up on the spot would be a game changer in the third world (as would be cheaper MRI machines to begin with), but for the first world it wouldn't be so much of a change.

What did change things dramatically was the reduction in the cost of ultra-sound but the complexity of an ultra-sound scanner compared to an MRI machine is orders of magnitude less, interpreting the results is still not the job of the tech administering the scan (though in the case of say a look at an infant in utero even a lay person can make out what is what and that's already useful).

Healthcare costs are an interesting subject of study, you could easily make a career out of that.