You can now understand why the UK is holding on the its NHS with white knuckles despite the Conservative push to dissolve it by stealth.
I suffer from sleep apnea and I too had an issue with my CPAP machine. The NHS fixed it within a week.
I can’t imagine spending 2 years chasing different health providers to sort a simple repair.
There was probably some argument for requiring a prescription when someone needed to adjust the pressure, but now that the machines do that themselves, they should probably just be available at Wal-Mart next to the reading glasses.
Apropos of anything else, the newest CPAP machines are relatively sophisticated. They may not be worth the $1,100 they sell for, but definitely more than $150. $500, maybe.
> The sleep apnea world is kind of a weird racket; in order to buy $150 worth of electronics, you need to pay a doctor $5000 to interpret the results of a sleep test.
ENT too. I had a deviated septum. Most (all?) of my life. Finally did something about it when I was 40. Went to an ENT, who was great. "Yup, right nostril, 90% occluded". "Makes sense. So when do we schedule the surgery?"
He sighs, and with a roll of his eyes (at the process, not me), "Welllll.... first I'm going to prescribe you these two nasal sprays so that you can come back in 30 days and tell me that, to our mutual shock, they didn't realign the cartilage in your nasal septum. At that point, insurance will approve the surgery and I can have it done within 3 days of getting that approval back."
Thankfully, that went like clockwork. I saw him on day 30, and they had an approval and 34 days after seeing him for the first time, it was taken care of.
But what a fuckshow.
I guess my point is that as reassuring (as a Brit) as it is to know the NHS is there, private insurance isn’t necessarily bad if regulated well (and that matches my experience of having private insurance in the UK too), it’s just America’s seems incredibly poorly regulated.
Correlation isn’t causation of course. Not suggesting golf courses cause doctors. But in general in this thread I see people from heavily golfed areas saying ‘I found a doctor really quickly’ and people from golf deserts talking about long waits.
Means it's easier to be frustrated waiting and then getting a 10 minute talk when it's flu or something similar, but get seen to in 10 minutes after arriving at a walk-in centre because you're worried of bine fissure in leg (turned out to be inflammation fortunately)
This was on a three-day business trip to the UK, which was extremely unlucky, but the NHS was fantastic.
And then of course you have the constant strikes and inability to even see a doctor at all unless you win the game of phone lottery.
The NHS may have a simple user interface, but it doesn't actually work when you need it so that's not very helpful. And the idea this is a Tory problem is propaganda. The NHS budget only ever goes higher yet service gets worse. Dumping ever more money into this third world system is never going to work.
It's visible in other systems too, where for example you end up with local government politicians fighting for "prestige" or even perceived need to have a specific kind of hospital in their area, but they don't have a way to bring enough patients to support it, so you get a system too fragmented to sustain despite spending more and more money.
A system that can't even provide dental slots without needing police to break up fights is a catastrophically failed system and it is a huge problem of the UK that people have loyalty to this dying corpse of a department.
Suddenly there's less money for smaller, cheaper things.
And what is the alternative? For-profit systems?
that is not typical
They have figured out the right time in the morning to call every day to try to grab a canceled appointment slot but it takes dedication.
This sort of thing depends heavily on where you live, what your insurance coverage is, and the specific condition you're seeking care for.
- Dermatologist: 5 months
- Cardiologist: 3 months
- ENT: 8 months (turned out to be a useless appointment too sadly)
According to my PCP last week, endocrinologists have stopped taking in patients that do not have urgent issues and even then it's a 6+ month wait. He said 9/10 of his referrals to endocrinologists in the last year have been denied.
I couldn't find a PT within 30 miles that could see me within "12-14 weeks".
This includes multiple consultations with sleep specialists and zero chasing from me.
I'd question the "by stealth" part of this.
Similar systems as the NHS have been introduced and subsequently canned in favor of more sane approaches in other European countries, which now have better (but still socialized) healthcare as a consequence.
There is no central european country with a similar amount of health care horror stories than the UK, and none where it plays a similarly important role in its identity. It boggles the mind.
...except people in the US.
People in the US would like a system that works. That means not waiting 666 days for a CPAP. It also means not having the government strongly nudge you to off yourself with its assistance, as in Canada. And it means not having an ever-increasing number of deaths by waiting, as with the NHS, which typically don't happen here for most kinds of care.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/30/national-tra...
Sadly, healthcare is expensive to provide regardless of who's paying. The NHS is able to provide even that troubled level of care because it pays its medical staff poorly by American standards, which it is able to do because it relies heavily on immigrants, which it is able to do in large part because those immigrants can't come to America and make 3x the salary since we make it incredibly difficult for foreign medical credentials to be recognized here. If we quit doing that tomorrow, the NHS would collapse by Friday.