This is a huge problem in US health care financing: we have a fee-for-service model, no price transparency, and a consumer base (insulated from a lot of the costs of procedures by indirect payment through employer-provided insurance) conditioned to think procedures are inherently good. We waste billions annually on procedures that shouldn't be delivered at all.

I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada.

I would posit this is more of a function of Canada having too few machines, with a median wait of 10 weeks for an MRI. [1]

To me it's crazy that people are waiting an average of nearly 3 months to get imaging. This is probably after waiting a couple months for their doctor's appointment to get the MRI scheduled in the first place.

[1] [https://getmrifast.ca/mri-wait-times]

>"I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada."

Long wait times (6-12 months+) for MRIs (due to a lack of both machines and technicians) are a frequent complaint by Canadians.

> I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada.

I'm also quite fond of pointing out that Canada and the state of California have roughly the same populations.

Canada's population is incredibly spread out, but also concentrated in about 5 major cities.

When I needed an MRI on my brain is was roughly a week, and that was in a smaller (under 100K people) city.

It's a triage system, although I wouldn't want to suffer through a "less important" issue.

At least most medications and interventions have to go through RCTs and tend to be quite standardized.

Don't even get me started with mental health therapy...

A lot of surgery that isn't directly saving you from death is worthless if you're lucky...

People love to complain about health insurance companies denying claims and prior authorization requests. While there are frequent errors and abuses on the payer side, the reality is that about a fifth of all treatments are "low value care" which aren't justified by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and may even harm patients. If we want to reduce healthcare costs and improve outcomes then we've got to get that under control.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635574128/

To be fair to your latter point, Massachusetts is arguably the biomedical research capital of the world, those MRI machines are being put to research purposes.

It's not strictly a US health care problem either - I've been dumbfounded by foreign coworkers pressing for totally unnecessary medical interventions as if there's no risk associated with doing such things. It's most apparent from the socialized states where the healthcare is ~free.

My impression is this is a modern civilization stupidity in general.

apropos Dead Kennedys track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVULKYbAeEo