Why does it take so long to schedule a doctor's appointment in the US?

Follow up with the physician, next morning.

All out of pocket for $80. No BS bureaucracy.

American healthcare is utter garbage.

I've never had one done, but I guess the hospital has an MRI also.

Counterpoint: in New York, I’ve never had to wait longer than a day or two for diagnostics. Most of the time it’s same day.

EDIT: to clarify, I'm not claiming it's hunky dory. Just that our system isn't an excuse for these delays.

I looked into doing exactly what your wife (seems to) does at the Mayo clinic recently. It's not entirely out of the question, about double to triple my out of pocket for going local via the usual route.

What they offer is basically this: Describe your issue to a care team prior to your arrival, once you arrive you will meet with your primary specialist and get referred to any tests/etc. you may need doing. These will all be scheduled in advance and simply canceled if you end up not needing them. Even the most likely procedure(s) will be scheduled, so you end up getting done in 2-3 days what typically would take 3-6mo due to wait times via my local hospital system.

It's incredibly tempting, despite the cost. The primary reason I go without medical care is due to the constant starting/stopping of the system. I need to focus on a problem and get it done with, not let it drag on for months.

On the surface this may be appealing but on reality it can lead to a pretty big waste of resources, and quite unwarranted worry for the patient. You can allways find something wrong with people, but if its not something that they notice or are leading to anything, is it worth finding?

There comes a point where spending more money on healthcare means there is less to spend on social support and that leads to worse health outcomes because poverty is a huge fe of ill health.

To take it to the extreme, nobody wants to live in a society made up only of doctors where there is no food to eat.

Living in the US I certainly feel I have been offered excess healthcare, tests given routinely that would JIT be ordered in other countries with better health outcomes. I suspect these are provided to reduce the amount spent lawyers so maybe it saves money in the end given the peculiarities of the US.

This is a stupid conspiracy theory. A very brief check shows the average salary of a doctor in the US is less than $200k annually. The AMA does not have the authority over licensing of doctors to restrict anything.

Deregulating medicine can easily be shown to be a disaster in the making... since the Reagan years, regulations on health care have been relaxed like most other limits placed on corporations and it's led to poor quality care, the highest health care spending in the world, and rent seeking middlemen pocketing billions.

Health care in the US needs to be a government provided single payer system.

Are you implying that only software engineers should make $500k/yr?

By the time a medical doctor completes training, she's nearly 30 years old, having made slave wages thus far, and now stuck with a few $100k+ of student loan debt. Don't forget malpractice insurance, overhead costs, etc.

Compare that to your average CS tech graduate who's making $200k+ at age 21 which they then spend on Teslas and ticky-tacky apartments.

Certain tests - e.g., echocardiography - are almost always ordered "stat" in the hospital. So it really means nothing unless the referring doctor calls the lab where they are performed and says "we are holding up an entire operating room and its personnel pending the results of this test". THAT gets results.

So, yes, "stat" referrals will get you in very quickly - but the referring doctor is placing their credibility on the line by doing so. They are asking the doctor being referred to to go out of their way and delay other patients in order to see you because what you have is something that needs to be seen right now. The referring doctor had better have a good reason to do so, or they will become the boy who cried wolf and get ignored.

Likewise, it's allowed for one surgeon to "bump" another one for an emergency case - but they have to call them personally and explain why this emergency can't even wait for a couple of hours (aside from massive trauma, almost all can).

The ear nose throat medical profession is so corrupt. They got the only medicine that works taken off the market so you have to see a doctor. By the time I see a doctor the infection is either gone or three times worse. So I buy the horse / dog / cat medicine instead. It's the same as a human medicine but the human medicine has been taken off the market! You can't talk me out of doing this because it's been working for me for 3 decades!

Lots of medicines have been castrated and/or taken off the market to drive more people to see doctors more -

1. Chlorasceptic 2. Burow's solution

Maybe there has been a paradigm shift here? Analogous to house-calls no longer being a "thing", maybe minor things like ear infections, pink eye, strep throat, etc. are now relegated to urgent care physicians. And your GP is more for following up on non-urgent and chronic/recurrent conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, etc..

I have family in NYC. For a non-emergency condition, the earliest appointment with a specialist was there months away. It was much easier to fly to India where one could get an appointment the same day.

After hours of discussion, my conclusion is it’s easy to make incremental improvements to the current system because it so obviously sucks. But it needs a revolution to handle universal health care.

Congress could do something else if they wanted. Or like hospitals could act privately to fund them.

There's probably all sorts of reasons it would be bad, but I like the idea of a revenue tax on hospitals. Automatically scales to the price of the most intensive care.

The quality of care is no worse at urgent care and you can typically make a same day appointment with the doctor if your choice. Yes they rush you through but so does primary care. Maybe in the past it was different.

Downside is that it may carry a higher deductible (for no good reason).

I come from a country with universal healthcare, and while public healthcare suffers from the same wait times we see in the US, private healthcare is on an entirely different league. For instance, with a good private health insurance plan, on a whim, without a referral, one could get an appointment at a decent specialist, and possibly the specialist of their choice within the week. My experience in the US is that you wait 3 months to see any specialist at all.

Often it's useful to get things going in private care and if you are not rich you can continue on the public system. The idea is that once you know which specialist you need to see, the waiting lists are shorter and you will be triaged depending on you situation. If that specialist happens to have long waitlist, you can choose to get private care and maybe get the actually expensive surgery in a public hospital. Also, the governments can run special programs where they purchase services from the private sector and offer those as public services where capacity is needed.

Most often patients don't need that advanced care or diagnostics and in some cultures people are just doctor-happy, so different lines with a premium tier can work to do good triage and optimize the workforce.

Last year, I was in visiting in Korea and needed to see a doctor. I randomly picked a name out of the phone book and asked my Korean-speaking friend to call and make an appointment. They said no appointment needed, just walk in. So I did.

The doctor saw me within 5 minutes of arrival. He did a physical exam, listened to my lungs, did a simple blood test and gave me a prescription. He then asked if I had insurance, to which I said No.

So he said: "I'm sorry I wlll have to charge you." I went out to the front desk and got the bill. It was the equivalent of $12. In the US it would be $300 before insurance, and $50 after -- not counting the lab cost, which would be separately billed. And all this would take weeks or months to schedule.

I went to a Korean pharmacy with a prescription for 30 days supply of multiple medicines, which in the US costs me $200 with insurance. In Korea, the cost was $50 without any insurance. I had a similar experience in Portugal years back.

People in the US don't realize how screwed up the healthcare system is here. And seem powerless to change things.

The staff may be “less experienced”, but I don’t need to waste my time and money on a doctor for an infection when they’ll prescribe me the same things a nurse practitioner would. And if I lack dental/eye insurance, then any care is better than none at all.

Though it should also be noted that the US doesn’t have many easily available forms of socialized medicine. We have four forms, two of which are highly state-dependent (which means its a PITA to get). First, veterans get free healthcare for life, paid entirely by the taxpayer via the federal government. Similar to colleges, where prices are insane because its basically the government signs blank checks, but that price thankfully never comes to the vet directly, unlike colleges.

Then we have Medicare and Medicaid, for those 65 or older and low income individuals respectively. You can get both, in fact the way coverages are split its almost assumed you will, but while Medicare is paid for by your own taxes, and thus almost immediately available to you once you hit 65, Medicaid is paid by everyones state taxes, and is notoriously hard to get. Additionally, since its a state-funded program, its offerings depend on each state. Finally we have “charity care”, also known as “financial assistance”, which federally is defined as “ free or discounted health services provided to persons who meet the organization’s eligibility criteria for financial assistance and are unable to pay for all or a portion of the services.”[0] This leaves the actual services available and eligibility at the discretion of state law, local law, and the hospital themselves.

So our long wait times aren’t exclusively due to any socialized programs. Instead, it’s almost exclusively due to a doctor shortage. For one, costs and time are a natural gate that’s basically ever present outside of extreme situations. One of the major blockades is in residency positions, a requirement for doctors that’s held with a firm grip by Congress via Medicare. And that’s not even getting into the limitations for importing doctors permanently via green cards.

[0] - IRC Section 501(r)(4) - https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistan...

You can just what's app your doctor whenever and they respond personally. It's affordable and when you see them they spent 45 minutes with you

American healthcare is a laughing stock

Having a medical professional on tap - I've never had to wait more than 15 mins to see someone virtually - is great and well worth the price of admission of you can afford it (couple hundred a year). Virtually is great because if you're sick, the last thing you want to do is leave the house, but they also do in person visits as well.

They also have the facilities to do blood draws and give vaccines.

Hope their new owner (Amazon) doesn't mess things up.

In my area (suburban CA, not particularly in the middle of nowhere), nearly all the doctors that are in-network are not accepting new patients. The one I found that had that magical overlap of "accepting new patients" and "in-network" has a 6-12 month waiting period for new patients. Hope I don't get sick!