It’s easy to have shorter wait times when nobody can afford to go there in the first place.
I don’t use healthcare at all because of all the stories I’ve heard about people getting slapped with medical bills for 1000s of dollars that their insurance decided wasn’t covered after all. Not dealing with that shit unless I think I’m dying. Realistically though I’ll probably try to sleep whatever ends up killing me off and that will be that.
As a Canadian, yeah, our wait times are rancid and they often get glossed over because of how bad America’s healthcare is in comparison. Don’t get me started on how Canadians will excuse any issue with the country because “at least we’re not as bad as America” and shit like that.
But damn it, I’d still take our busted healthcare system over virtually NO healthcare system. Fuck paying to live. Oh wait, that’s just capitalism.
Americans enjoy the shortest wait times when they go the ER to find out they have stage 4 colon cancer.
From diagnosis to the grave is on average only a few months! 🇺🇸
And while they’re there they let the adrenaline surge of the realization they just got fed feet first into the meat grinder of American healthcare by using the ER as primary care make them punch a nurse in the face. I say this as someone who’s made a career out of talking them out of that.
it depends on which hospital, which insurance, or provider you are using, it varies widely. it can be 1 week to months. also the faster wait time, is likely the more expensive one too.
Shorter wait times, lol. No we don’t have shorter wait times. I was on a wait list to get an appointment. After 8 months, they called to see if I wanted to stay on the list, I said yes, and I never heard from them again.
Later, I had to wait almost a year for an appointment with a neurologist for a sleep disorder.
My follow up appointment with that neurologist will happen almost full year after my first appointment.
you cant see a 2nd opinion?, assuming you arnt using things like medi-caid,care. or a shoddy insurance.
Shorter for some things, longer for others. Getting in to maintain medication in a new location is apparently way faster in the US. That said, that’s not a flaw of universal healthcare, especially seeing as I could do it on medicaid
Absolutely not shorter wait times.
The wait time is a complete myth made up by the US. It can take months in the US to get an appointment with a PCP - if you don’t get shunted to an NP or something instead. Then more weeks for any specialized tests like an MRI. Which you have to pay a good chunk for even with insurance. Then weeks for whatever’s next, or followup visits.
If it’s an emergency, like any country, you can go to an ER/ED and be seen at a time based on severity of need. Difference is other countries will charge little to nothing, but in the US you will be charged quite a bit. Even more if your insurers decide you’re “out of network” or some such, or if they don’t outright deny your claims anyway.
But for non-emergency tests other than basic things like blood tests that don’t appear to require prompt intervention? Yeah. Weeks to months in most places.
Just bullshit made up by Big Med and Big Pharma regurgitated by politicians on their payroll to keep your $$$ flowing into the pockets of multi-million- and billionaires.
A lot of American’s believe in that myth because they just don’t go doctors at all. They have no reference to compare wait times to.
Is a week a long wait time? A year? American’s don’t fucking know.
Yep. It takes 3 months to get an appointment for a regular physical. I don’t know what my schedule is next month, much less 3 months from now. I have to arrange an entire month around ensuring I get that one day off.
Guess how many yearly physicals I get.
im currently trying to arrange my work schedule so i can make appts because i had a sudden flare up of a skin condition, its pretty severe atopic dermatitis. but was denied any hours changed(changing so i can have time to see appointments) by a nosey employer, also dont really want to give him the reason why i want to change hours. as i am making too much right now for state subsidized healthcare(just slightly enough over the income limit) you have to report income and you get removed, and its not stable enough employment to get decent insurance.
i 2 types of people that can afford insurance that dont go to doctors if they have symptoms of something. 1 is they already are paying for it, but they are paying alot per month, so they avoid going to the doctor until thier symptoms get severe, because they assume thier preniums are going to increase if they “go to one for any reason”.
2nd is the ones that are uninsured,think they can get insurance right away and see a doctor immediately if they suddenly get very chronically ill or severe symptoms.
it also convoluted, it depends if they have in house testing, or 3rd party, or you have to go to another university for more testing. most of the time, blood testing are in house, unless your doctor is pretty private practice, then that can take a while. alot of private insurance is already being subsidized anyways, its just companies act as a MIDDLEMAN charging for the exchange in services.
I get the message. But this is incorrect. You don’t have shorter wait times in the US.
In Canada some wait times, for non-emergency procedures and in high traffic areas are publicized, usually by the forces who would benefit from privatization.
I can quickly counter those anecdotes with anecdotes of my own: I have never waited long for medical care because I live in a low traffic area and I don’t seek low priority medical care.
What you actually have in the US is a greater opportunity for shorter wait times as the result of paying a premium…but you also have longer wait times and people foregoing care entirely that they would receive in Canada.
Yeah I was gonna say, have the people repeating this actually used American healthcare? We have terrible wait times in addition to our other horrible issues.
Like…you can find sweet spots where US care is faster than Canadian care when you compare apples to apples…ie if you’re wealthier and your region doesn’t have poor people to care for. It should be obvious why that’s the case and how erosionary it is for our rich to lobby to pull their tax dollars out of our system so they can seek non-emergency care down there or in our increasing amount of private clinics.
When our media criticizes Canadian health care…it’s almost a single procedure criticism: hip replacements. But when they compare Canada to the US…they don’t mention that a giant chunk of Americans just don’t get hip replacements because they’re ineligible or they can’t afford them, so they’re not even counting those people in the queues. Up here a homeless junkie is on the same wait list as a billionaire (in theory…but not in practice because a homeless junkie isn’t very likely to be diagnosed).
Shorter time also doesn’t matter if you can’t afford to go at all
Might depend where you live. Here in Quebec, I know someone who could either get his cancer cured in 2+ years here (which would have been too late, but technically free or almost free), or instantly in the US but for 200k, so he raised money and got it cured in the US.
Could be that this isn’t the same in other parts of Canada, but at least in Quebec, this kind of story is very common. At a smaller scale, one would pay to go to the private sector here instead.
It absolutely depends on where you are…I allowed for that in my reply. I’m talking about the national average…including all people…not just rich ones.
I’m skeptical that in Quebec that you die of “cancer” before receiving treatment (without evidence)…because I’m familiar with the care here in Ontario, and that’s generally not the case. My guess is you’re talking about a specific type of more rare cancer treatment that’s not covered by your province.
But, I mean, yes…if you can afford to pay to skip the line…obviously you’re going to have better outcomes in the US system. I said that. But you have to count all the people that can’t afford it or forego care entirely…and in your anecdote you’re not doing that.
I’ll repeat that most people can not afford to skip the line.
Of course I agree a long wait time for treatment is better than no treatment at all. But the common concern here I hear from most people around me is that it’s generally much slower (at least in Quebec) than in other countries with such healthcare (eg. Scandinavian countries). How much of that is just a case of “the grass is greener on the other side”, I do not know.
I’ve been fortunate enough to not require healthcare so far, though I’m not sure how it will go when I need it. The population is getting older, and older people generally need more healthcare. That’s less health workers for more sick people and less workers paying for more healthcare.
Oh…the Canadian system is absolutely not funded as well as the Nordic countries, for example…and it’s getting worse as transfer payments continue to be cut, and as provinces don’t spend those payments on health.
The issue isn’t the aging population so much as what I said above: governments keep using healthcare to balance budgets because it’s such a big line item and it’s low hanging fruit they can use to show fiscal “success”. It would be easy to just fund our system…and that, in turn, would make our lives cheaper.
But fiscally “conservative” governments like to perpetuate the myth that our system has poor outcomes and paying out of pocket is preferable…so rich people can benefit from their wealth - health wise. It’s sad to watch it erode.
My American healthcare:
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Its so much more expensive under Trump. It went from $250/month for my family, to now $1100/month.
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My kid hurt themselves and we were in the urgent care waiting area for 2 hours. Then a professional looked him over, said they’ll be fine, and gave us some expensive pain killer pills.
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I have to schedule my appointments 4-6 months in advance.
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I had to get a referral for some health services and after two weeks, they finally had a slot to actually start scheduling the appointment. Then they asked about my insurance and told me that they are out-of-network, and recommended another practice. I now have to wait another few more weeks, just to hopefully be seen.
My favorite from this past summer, was when I waited over 2 months for an appointment and the day before the appointment the office called me and said they’d been bought out and didn’t take my insurance anymore. I had to find another place and wait another 2 months for that appointment.
A couple years ago I’d called a doctor’s office to set up an appointment because I hadn’t seen a doctor for ten years prior to this. The soonest they could fit me in was 8 months out.
In that time span of waiting for that appt, I was laid off from my job and had to call and cancel it because I had no insurance anymore. It was the most defeated I’d felt in a long time.
Ive been getting my anxiety meds from this online medical clinic for a few years. Didn’t need insurance just paid a monthly fee and I could talk to health professionals for whatever health issue I was having. A few months ago I was notified they were bought by an insurance company so now they can only serve customers with that insurance. So just fuck everyone that used the service before no more meds for them !!
I just waited a month for an appointment at a new doctor, nothing special. Had to spend an entire afternoon calling around to find her, even given my insurance’s list of providers. And since we’re on Obamacare, I don’t know if I have insurance anymore, haven’t been brave enough to open the latest letters.
i was under state subsidized healthcare, i waited four months for a specialist, a charge nurse just hung up because “she was waiting for someone else” and when i got to appt wait several more hours, and was forgotten in a waiting room for hours.
Except for the prices, that sounds pretty similar to how it works in Germany right now …
Except we don’t have healthcare networks. Either a practice takes any insurance or it takes none. That’s a huge advantage over the American system.
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I can’t believe my fellow Americans who are so worried about how much a real healthcare system would cost when we are getting crushed under the most expensive fucking system in the world. It’s like they take all the current price tags from our corrupt, bullshit system that doesn’t serve everyone and apply them to the whole population, completely ignoring the price negotiation power of single-payer and all the gouging and waste we get from the corporations.
we pay 2-4times as much as the next country, plus we have worst heatlh outcomes in terms of mortality and morbidity even under an insurance. oh but we can pay 800+bn to fund defense contractors and ISRAEL own healthcare and military, soon to be 1.5trillion in defense budget because trump think this is a better distraction. oh and a nice fact, the military and thier family also has accessed to subsidized insurance, aka tricare.
also healthcare for new mothers is pretty pisspoor, in both prenatal and post natal births. POC, and black people gets the worst outcomes(morbidity and mortality) over white mothers.
The 2024 election in particular has shown that we have a LOT of really fucking stupid people here.
they cant stand her laugh, and i dont like her, and she doesnt know any plans= really means sexist, racist, mysogynistic voters. they will try to use certain excuses why they dont want to vote for her.
I am probably just older than you but this hit me big in 2004. I was like “oh… you want more of this? What the fuck…”
That one could at least be explained by 9/11 “patriotism.” Still stupid, though.
it sad, it convinced so many people to join the military, people that are down in thier luck, especially when the08 crisis hit, even more tried to join as cannon fodder.
I was so disgusted by the Iraq invasion as a response to 9/11 that I felt sure the patriotic thing to do was get Halliburton out of the White House. But they managed to scare up all that WMD noise and then they invented “swift boating.” All this after they literally stole the 2000 election.
I know what you mean though. And it was all extremely stupid. Hillary helped, which is why I never supported her.
it worked with netanyahu in the 90s with irans claims of WMD? bush is just taking advice from a teacher.
I’m a physician in the US and had to wait 11 months for a dermatology appointment at the same hospital system I work at and the insurance owned by the same hospital system covered $95 of the $430 bill. We do not have it better than Canada, at all.
People who say Canada has longer wait times ignore that the US doesn’t count the wait times poor or uninsured people have, or people that forgo care entirely. They compare well insured people in the US to the entire Canadian system.
The Canadian system definitely has its shortcomings, and is getting worse…ie if you live in an area with a concentration of poor or old people. But the reason it’s getting worse is because conservative government continue to force the profit motive on health systems as they cut funding and introduce private components.
I have very good health insurance from my company for my family…wait times are still months and months. When I needed a CT for what the wife and I thought was a damn brain tumor, was a 3 week wait…for a fucking possible brain tumor. My insurance is what is considered Cadillac health insurance. It’s stupid expensive.
Yet I have wait times longer than any single payer western healthcare.
Anyone who thinks that US healthcare is better than the “socialism” healthcare is a fucking idiot.
i have state subsidized healthcare, and the wait time is very long, obviously not insane like waiting 1+years. you guess it the majority of the patients that cant afford insurance are POCs, especially older ones. almost no white people.
yea one specialist i had to see with a state healthcare i had to wait 4 months, and wait a very long time in the waiting room, and then forgotten because they were too busy.
I came down with flu symptoms this week and went to the local urgent care. Waited an hour to be seen, they did a rapid flu and covid swab and it came back negative. They told me that the flu strain going around right now doesn’t test positive for a few days and that it’s probably the flu given all of the symptoms. They told me that I am young and healthy enough so I should just take Tylenol and drink fluids and ride it out. All in all it took 2 hours and there was a $100 co-pay with my insurance that I pay out the ass for. No tamiflu script. This medical system is trash. Every time I get sick my wife urges me to go to urgent care and I’m like “no, they are completely unhelpful and it costs too much money”
I would be much more willing to go if it didn’t cost so much and take so long.
One of these days something is actually going to be wrong, and my distrust for the medical system is going to land me in the hospital for something that was treatable.
did ever get retested?, flu symptoms come on hard and fast, covid sometimes take a while, if not milder.
My daughter tested positive for Flu A a couple days later. So I’m assuming that’s what everybody has.
Why would you go to urgent care for the flu? Unless you had a dangerously high fever or something, is that not just a waste of resources and cause of longer wait times…?
if the symptoms are so intense you could not treat it with otc, it can happen. like with covid, the sore throat i had was so severe i tried seeing a physician for it, but i dint want to risk infecting others.
Unless you had a dangerously high fever or something
You might be mixing up urgent care with emergency care. Urgent care is a walk-in for sicknesses etc. If I tried to make an appointment with my primary physician, it’s like 2 months out, minimum. Another awful part of our current system.
No, I understand that. But if you don’t have any symptoms aside from “having the flu”, they’re just going to give you Tylenol and send you home. It’s a waste of hospital resources, unless, like I said, you have extraneous circumstances.
Oh, I was hoping for a tamiflu prescription. I was hanging out with my family last Saturday, and my brother-in-law came down with symptoms on Sunday. He went to urgent care on Monday, similarly tested negative, but was given a tamiflu script. The script helped him kick it in 2 days. I came down with symptoms on Tuesday and went to urgent care hoping for the same thing, but got nothing. Now I’m on day 6 of being sick but today is the first time I didn’t wake up in a pool of sweat, so that’s good.
Ibhave two very young children and I wanted to reduce my chances of spreading it to them. One of them is safe so far, but the other, is down for the count. Having to take care of a toddler with the flu while also down with the Flu was something I was trying to avoid. It’s been a tough week.
tbh that is underselling how terrible the American healthcare system is lol. die from waiting? more like die from being denied medically necessary procedures by a Prior Authorization team who has never met the patient they make these decisions for and has the authority to reject the demands and recommendations of physicians treating the patient. more like die from avoiding going to the ER because you don’t want to deal with even more debt, so you stay at home and “sleep it off.”
its also the fact that people with insurance will put off seeing a doctor until its severe enough or its too late.
Murica!
Why would I want to live longer in america don’t we suffer enough
Been ER in both USA and Spain; USA for a kidney stone and Spain for severe panic attack we confused for a heart attack (were prone to those even at young age due to health condition) both had a wait time.
USA hospital: wait time was 15 minutes, hospital was not busy at all, no one to check on us while waiting. Overall experience 3/5. Costs ~4,3kusd
Spain hospital: wait time was 5 minutes, hospital was really busy but still had a nurse look over us and a few others while waiting. Overall experience 5/5. Costs 60€
There’s still a few things we don’t like how they do medical stuff here, but we also have the option of doing private health insurance and getting our own doctor out just paying for a doctor out right at a reasonable amount. 🤷🏻♀️
Edit: note we can’t get public insurance yet as we can’t pay taxes yet as an immigrant. Sucks, but those the dice. With public insurance the hospital would’ve been free :P
dammit my USA hospital is usually 3-12 hours, triaged about the same severity as a kidney stone. I would like to trade please.
3-12 hours is insanely long omfq. When we were in the USA hospital it was also for kidney stones. Can’t think of any other time going to the hospital personally tbh.
The 12 hour waits were kind of insane stories. One I get to personally blame on Dick Cheney
