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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite health care facts: there are more MRI machines in the state of Massachusetts than there are in the entire country of Canada.

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I think this one might not be true anymore. Canada has 432 machines as of ~2023 (340 in 2015) and MA is on the order of ~300 (can't find exact figures). It's still a lot lower per capita (10.8 per million vs 42 per million).

So the new comparison is Canada and Illinois. I can remember that! :)

(Thanks for catching this! I had no idea.)

This is super weird, isn't it? Some of it is obviously overprescription on the US side, but also: Canada could just get more machines.

It's kinda weird, yeah! Not sure if Canada thinks the rest of the world overuses MRI machines in a cost x diagnostically inefficient way, or what, but I'm sure months-long waiting lists aren't optimal either.

I know that you tend to be balls deep in American Exceptionalism, but the truth is that reasonable countries with reasonable health care average 15-30 MRI machines per million inhabitants.

America is a wild outlier, and unless you have data to back that those machines are put to good use, I'd trust the rest of the world who decided the sweet spot is 15-30 mer million, not 60.

This statistic appears to have flown directly over your head. It is not an illustration of how awesome the United States is. The overprovision of MRIs in the US drives costs in a variety of ways; one of the most obvious is that routine imaging for things like back pain leads directly to things like spinal fusion surgeries, which don't work.

The gap between Canada and the United States is immense. Canada could add quite a large number of machines and not come even within the line of sight of where the US is.

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