The US system has always seemed available, especially Doctor/urgent care visits. Clearly there are procedures that are inaccessible to certain demographics.
And there's the rub; in the U.S. you pay for healthcare with your money, and in Canada you pay with your time. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
2024.
Presumably something on the wait list will open up sooner... somebody who made an appointment in February 2023 and got treated by somebody else. Or just died. Meantime, we'll try to find somebody else.
But the notion of "Americans always get health care quickly compared to everybody else" strikes me as absurd. Some things work well, but other things work very, very badly.
Using insurance and going through a doctor it can be difficult (understatement!) to find out what something will cost ahead of time. Your insurance may charge you $150 for a sick visit to the doctor, and the doctor may tell you there is no charge for the test, but unless you ask the right questions you won't find out that they are just talking about their part of taking the blood sample and ordering the test, they won't volunteer that there may be third party lab charges, and they and their office staff will have no idea what those charges might be. It can take a lot of time to chase down all the parties involved - your insurance company, the doctor, the lab, for other things maybe a radialogist, an anaesthesiologist, and/or facility charges at a hospital or clinic, medications from pharmacist, and so on, trying to find out what the total bill might be, and there are no guarantees, any of them can tell you one price and bill something different, it might depend on which billing codes are used for each procedure, and you may not get all the bills for months. Doctors have you sign a paper saying you will pay for anything deemed medically necessary, and these third parties will threaten to send you to collections based on that, if you complain. Typical insurance plans have a yearly deductable of several thousand dollars, applicable to non-preventive care, with the idea being to incentivize people to pay attention to the costs for routine care (there's also an out of pocket maximum, perhaps $10-15k per year). But the costs are obfuscated. It's not a free market system, it's a scam, a jobs program for health care administrators (3200% increase from 1975 to 2010) [1].
[0] https://www.testing.com/tests/thyroid-stimulating-hormone-ts...
[1] https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
I also believe you can sometimes pay out of pocket for things like x-rays / MRI's in the USA and get them for surprisingly "affordable" rates (trivially affordable to those making >$100,000/year USD, utterly out of reach for kitchen workers). Sometimes though, the diagnostic facilities with the MRI machines will require a prescription, but that's nt mandated by law.
0: https://www.discountedlabs.com/thyroid-stimulating-hormone-t...
1: https://www.privatemdlabs.com/lab_tests.php?q=tsh&view=searc...
The majority of people aren’t going to urgent care for random checkups. The over reliance on urgent care in the US is a byproduct of a system that means people often have no other option (dr doesn’t take your particular insurance, your insurance doesn’t actually cover checkups, …) and the general cost of preventative care in the US meaning people don’t get things looked at prior to them becoming much bigger problems, where they do become urgent.
Just so we're clear: "urgent care" doesn't mean "ER".
Most medical providers would advise against this. Managing someone's health is not the same thing as changing the oil in a car. It's immensely helpful for the medical provider to develop a working relationship with the patient and understand the person's conditions and medications.
You talk about availability in a couple other comments; at my provider, I can usually get an appointment with my PCP within a couple days, vs almost certainly waiting at least 30 minutes at the urgent care.
I think the last routine thing I went in for was a sprain evaluation (I wanted advice on strengthening the joint more than I was expecting any immediately useful treatment). There wasn't any urgency there really, and I wanted to discuss it with the doctor. If I thought I needed antibiotics for something I would just go to the urgent care.
I won't go to urgent care for a physical.
Ok, that changes my response quite a bit - because there's a real issue in the US where the set up of the healthcare system means people have to go to the ER, but urgent care is substantially different.
However a lot of my points still stand: many urgent cares are associated with specific insurance or medical groups which means they simply aren't available. Additionally urgent care typically comes with a significant increase in costs, ruling them out for most.