Regardless of insurance issues, are there actually evidence-based medicine guidelines to support an immediate MRI for back injuries? By injury do you mean some kind of specific trauma, or any serious back pain regardless of suspected cause? Many patients do recover with OTC analgesics, proper physical therapy, and time.
What you'll find with imaging for those structures is that many patients appear to have abnormalities or apparent pathologies, including patients who don't have any pain. So while MRI can be helpful for diagnosis and treatment it isn't necessarily definitive.
There is always going to be a resource allocation and care rationing issue with expensive services like MRI. Other countries with socialized healthcare often have long queues for non-emergency MRIs. In fact, we often see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queues.
https://peterattiamd.com/stuartmcgill/
What you'll find with imaging for those structures is that many patients appear to have abnormalities or apparent pathologies, including patients who don't have any pain. So while MRI can be helpful for diagnosis and treatment it isn't necessarily definitive.
There is always going to be a resource allocation and care rationing issue with expensive services like MRI. Other countries with socialized healthcare often have long queues for non-emergency MRIs. In fact, we often see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queues.