As income inequality in the US reaches unprecedented levels, more Americans are forced to do without basic necessities. Families are chaining buy-now, pay-later schemes together to afford groceries, while the cost of utilities skyrockets, thanks in large part to the AI data center boom.

Belt tightening is also playing out in the healthcare industry. In a recently published survey by healthcare polling firm KFF, a whopping 36 percent of respondents said they’ve skipped or postponed a visit to the doctor for financial reasons in 2025, up from 25 percent just two years prior. It’s a grim statistic, coinciding with an alarming rise in the number of Americans going without health insurance.

Yet for those in the top income brackets, the outlook is much rosier. A tidal wave of buzzy new health startups marketed to the upper echelons of society means that the wealthy never have to do without curated radiation exposure kits or AI devices that analyze their stool.

One growing sector tailoring to the haves is the “diagnostic” — or on-demand — MRI trade, embodied by startups like Prenuvo and Neko Health.

Offering full-body scanning services and subsequent analysis by medical experts, these companies aren’t for the little guy. For example, though Prenuvo advertises that a single full-body scan can “detect over 500 conditions across 33 organs,” it doesn’t come cheap, starting at $2,500 for a “comprehensive” scan, or up to $4,000 for “executive” treatment.

On one hand, obsessive DIY health-solutionism may not be the most effective wellness strategy. As H. Gilbert Welch, a researcher at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Mass General Brigham told the New York Times, MRIs-on-demand are a fast track to “having a whole bunch more done to you, and worrying about stuff and then maybe being hurt in the process.” You’ll “certainly being made poorer in the process,” he quipped.

There’s certainly something to be said for efficacy of the health monitoring craze, but it’s beside the point. Zooming out, just these two firms, Prenuvo and Neko Health, have received some $1.2 billion in funding — a massive allocation of resources to build luxury health platforms at a time when over a third of Americans choose to avoid the doctor for fear of a bill they can’t afford.

That’s a galling structural imbalance between who needs health solutions and who actually gets them — and one which no amount of full-body scans can fix.

More on healthcare: Hospitals Are Getting So Hot That Surgeries Are Getting Canceled and Staff Are Fainting