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I waited 8 months to see a Neurologist in Toronto for a slipped disk in my neck (he was in disbelief and shocked). By the time he saw me, it had healed on it's own.
There are plenty of multi-month waitlists in the US for common medical procedure. My wife sees a sleep doctor. Our insurance is fantastic. He has a nice, expensive office in an upscale regional medical center. I don't know which car in the parking lot is his, but there's a lot of nice cars in that parking lot.
It is a ----ing nightmare. Multi-month waiting lists to first see him. Month-long waits for scheduling anything. Three-month wait to schedule a minor surgery. [1] He screws up her prescription changes, the pharmacy won't dispense because he didn't tick some box on a form, and he goes on holiday for a few weeks. His on-calls aren't able to fix the problem, because, well, they aren't on-call for his sleep practice. Guess who can't get her prescription?
And for this privilege, we and my employer pay ~$20,000/year. I suppose we could fire his ass, and switch doctors, with no guarantee that the next one won't be any worse. [3]
[1] Cherry on top - despite being fully covered for the procedure, and paying what they asked for at the time of the operation, the surgery center started calling us, demanding money. Guess who gets to untangle billing? [2] We do. Guess who, once the dust settled, turned out to have overcharged us, and eventually cut us a cheque? The surgery center.
[2] Double-whammy - my wife dropped her old insurance two years ago, to switch to mine. Guess who started sending us bills last month? Her primary care provider, because at some point his office realized that she is no longer on her old insurance. Somehow, it's taken them two years to realize this. I'm assuming that the new provider has been paying them all this time, but who even knows at this point?
[3] I must say, my best interaction with the US healthcare system so far has been at a walk-in clinic located in a crummy office with peeling wallpaper, patient examination rooms that doubled as storerooms, a broken water cooler, and a bathroom with a door that mostly closed, located above a laundromat in an, ah, common part of town. The staff consisted of the doctor, who was cycling through patients, and his assistant, who was translating to and from Spanish, juggling papers and photocopies, and doing vaccinations and blood draws. I was in, I had what I needed done, and I was out, with zero billing bullshit. I didn't see any Teslas in the parking lot, though.