It's the same everywhere across the world. It seems that all hospitals and clinics everywhere are operating on a 2-3-months waiting list
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.
That's fucked up.
While it's mostly not quite as bad here in Norway, it's getting there.
Lots of GP's here are quitting because they've been overloaded by paperwork. Government wants more documentation on everything. Can't just trust "some random doctor" who's known the patient for decades to sign a few days of sick leave, nope, we need paper trail!
My SO's GP almost started crying during one of her checkups since he was so overworked. He'd have a normal day seeing people during normal working hours, then there would be at least 5-6 hours of paperwork to do. He quit half a year later.
The newly trained doctors have caught on and don't apply for open GP positions. The result is that we have a massive deficit of GPs which keeps getting worse day by day.
Ten patients die because there was no doctor to see them? Nothing important.
One patient sued because a doctor made a mistake that didn't even kill them? Hugely important, ten more pages of paperwork will have to be added; the paperwork won't prevent it happening again, but now it'll clearly be the doctor that is liable, not the practice/hospital/insurance company.
If it's not a scheduled appointment, but a "next available time" one, ask to be put on a cancellation notification if you're near the doctor's office; they get a cancellation, call you, you're there in 10 minutes kind of thing.
I thought, "huh." That was around 6 am. I mulled it over: did I even want an earlier appointment? I'm not a big fan of doctors (full disclosure: I am one). So I went about my day and finally around 1 p.m. decided it wouldn't hurt to have a look; after all, I could ignore or decline the offered new slot.
No worries: when I logged on around 1 p.m., the portal said the new slot was no longer available.
I wasn't sad.
If you live around the bay area, I'd love to buy you lunch sometime. You are indisputably a super interesting person, @bookofjoe! Email in profile, promise I'm pretty cool as far as humans go :p
If you're not in the bay stea, would still likely to connect with you if you're open to it. Cheers good sir.
I lived in LA from 1966-1983, when I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I've remained.
I'm easy to connect with: bookofjoe@gmail.com
When I'm not acting out on HN, I do so in these arenas:
https://www.bookofjoe.com/ (since August 2004) https://www.youtube.com/user/bookofjoe (since March 2006) https://twitter.com/bookofjoe (since November 2006)
This is a combination of things:
1) Being a specialist is much more lucrative
2) The AMA has been resisting calls to increase the pipeline of doctors
3) The absolutely shitty treatment of medical interns.
4) Many of them left due to Covid (the primary care physician is on the front line dealing with the Covidiots)
I agree that most of what GPs do is be a "router" than sends your packet to various specialists. But somebody actually has to do it.
https://www.aanp.org/advocacy/state/state-practice-environme...
Of course they will escalate some care to other providers.
Maybe it's a very popular doctor?
Kaiser's web portal showed no PCP doctors available, but when I called I was able to get assigned.
Might as well drive or fly to another area for healthcare.
Due to this wait, I've been conditioned to treat it as a last resort. Perhaps that is the desired effect.
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.
By mid sized I mean approx 100k people, and it's an hour+ drive to anywhere bigger.
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.
Patient outcomes and public health are irrelevant and unimportant; only profit matters.
ie. there must be some other incentive for a system, operated by humans, to succeed.
If I'm not a good person, your system fails. It literally only takes one...