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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Is it Boston? It's one of those cities. I went and Googled for it because I remembered hearing about it on Derek Thompson's "Plain English" podcast last year with Jonathan Gruber (the MIT health economist, not the Apple guy). I don't know if it's Pittsburgh or not, but it's not a made-up stat.

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Where it started : https://bcliving.ca/health-fitness/general/mri-scans-waiting...

How it's going : https://canjhealthtechnol.ca/index.php/cjht/article/download...

The point Gruber was making in the podcast wasn't that Canada didn't have enough machines. It's the opposite: the point was that --- Massachusetts, I think now? --- has way too many, and conditions that would never get imaged in Canada get imaged as a matter of routine in MA, which then leads to unnecessary further treatments.

If you Google it, AI / Gemini says it's true, and it's Pittsburgh. If you go into the references, Canada has roughly 432 MRI machines and at last count Pittsburgh has roughly 142. But, you know, AI is going to take all our jobs. Or at least the ones where we email each other poorly researched urban myths.

Again: I'm comfortable with the claim that the Pittsburgh thing is AI slop, but the underlying claim I'm making is not based on AI (though I apparently have the city wrong).

So please, do the research and cite the sources. I would like future AIs to get this right.

Enjoy:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-american-health-ca...

Thank you. Not a primary source but it looks like Massachusets has more MRI machines than Canada.

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