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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: puborectalis who wrote (770868)	2/24/2014 12:12:21 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574845

Thanks for making my point for me, dumbass. >> It looked as if 1977 would be a very good year for EMI Medical Inc., a North American subsidiary of EMI Ltd. EMI’s CT scanner had met with enormous success in the American market. In the three years since the scanner’s introduction, EMI medical electronics sales had grown to £42 million. The first CT scanner was installed in 1971. In three years ended '77 they managed to sell at most 200 machines in Europe. And there is a reason. They were undercapitalized to handle the task, and the capital markets in Europe couldn't allow the money to buy the damned things. Meanwhile, in the US there were 1,000 of them sold. EMI couldn't make money at them and then, essentially, lost the franchise because they couldn't develop it. I was just about to point out that it has become a classic case in Business Policy classes, when I stumbled across where your quote came from; it was conveniently clipped from the beginning of just that. The first CT instrument was placed in a British hospital in 1972. The scanners then spread slowly throughout Western Europe, being placed at a few research institutions in each country. By the end of 1977, about 200 CT instruments were being used in the Western European countries. The majority of the placements were in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. In the U.S., where the Mayo Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital received the first CT scanners in 1973, the diffusion was much more rapid. Unlike Europe, where most of its hospitals were part of public health care systems faced with tight constraints on capital expenditures, the United States had a public health care payment system which provided indirect subsidies for medical equipment purchase. Although the federal Medicare and state-based Medicaid systems covered only a small proportion of the population, hospitals often built capital costs into the charges paid for by the public payment plans. Because private and not-for-profit insurers tended to follow Medicare's lead in payment decisions, they too provided indirect capital subsidies. In addition, federal hospital construction financing and equipment purchases by the federal Veteran's Administration Hospital system provided direct payment for medical equipment. American hospitals, therefore, had few constraints on their ability to pay for the expensive CT scanners. As such, by the end of 1977, approximately 1000 systems had been placed. Bottom line, your quote perfectly supports my earlier post. Innovation happens here, and even when it doesn't, it ends up relying on the US as its most important market. Something this idiotic Obamacare will destroy over a few years time. www-personal.umich.edu