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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

This passage:

> Before this brace becomes the standard of care, it will face challenges. In parts of Brazil, doctors often stay faithful to less effective solutions because they make more money delivering them.

Struck me as mildly derogatory; my impression (I'm not from the US, but I parse Wired as speaking from a US perspective) is that it's not ... completely rare to make that accusation for US doctors, too. :|

Of course, saying "this is a problem in Brazil" is not the same as saying "unlike in the US, this is problem in Brazil", but that's how I read it, for some reason.

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Thanks for the note. Just FYI, I'm the writer and there was no malice intended in my description. The sense I got in the interview was that the medical system in Brazil is fragmented to a much greater degree than in the US/EU where national healthcare establishes a more uniform standard of care. Of course there are cases of this same behavior in the US, but I'd wager they're far more rare.

How much are you willing to wager? :)

You can probably find Brazilian examples that have no direct equivalent in USA, but USA has plenty of cases of physicians: accepting large gifts from drug companies in exchange for prescribing certain drugs, ordering expensive tests to pay for expensive test machines, performing procedures based on cost rather than efficacy, etc. In future you're advised to write in a less biased manner, and to make fewer foolish wagers.

There is no national healthcare system in the USA.

The USA actually has one of the largest single payer healthcare systems in the world: The VA.

About 1/6th of the country is covered by Medicare. Medicaid covers another 20%+ and increasingly being nationalized. All told, we're looking at 1/3 of the US population's healthcare being paid for by the Government. The prices set by the government tend to drive the price levels adopted by the private payers. So while there is no NHS equivalent, the US government is critically important in the set up of the reimbursement structure.

Heh. Point. Let me amend that to - the majority of Americans are not covered by a national health care system.

there is a national healthcare system, just not 'free' healthcare.

I'm from the US, and I got the impression that the passage was meant as an objective observation.

There are a lot of criticisms to be aimed at many levels of the US healthcare industry, and I don't think anyone would claim otherwise.

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