tine procedures as pap smears and mammograms can now involve waiting as long as several months. These waiting times, according to a Macleans article, are "only one highly visible symptom of an underlying crisis that is undermining Canada's health care system."
It is important to gain a perspective on what constitutes an expensive piece of equipment: what do we mean by "expensive?" Not only is the equipment extraordinarily costly, but the use and maintenance is expensive as well. Referred to as "the medical technology arms race" by a New York Times headline (April 29, 1991), the buildup of high tech equipment poses the ultimate challenge for cost containment. Michael D. Reagan cites the article as an example of the immense costs, or "expensive diffusion," involved. The article examines:
the expensive diffusion now going on of the newest imaging machine, a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. CAT (computer-assisted tomography) and MRI imaging provide cross-sectional data on tissue structures; PET scanners reveal information on tissue f
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