America is hell
That sucks. Here in Spain I’m free to go to the doctor, she’ll tell me “sorry, we only have 10 minutes, you can get another appointment for next week and we’ll continue”… but at least it’s something.
doctors only have 10 minutes in America, too. They need to see as many patients as possible and make as much money as possible for the practice. The difference is that in American that 10 minutes costs you 12-20 hours worth of work to pay for.
From what I’ve heard, US doctors don’t see that much out of that money either, but here at least they take it out of our taxes… which, somewhat interestingly, are at about the same rate as in the US.
The u.s. government spends more on healthcare per Capita than any other country as well. They give money to private insurance to cover people on public assistance such as the elderly and veterans. They don’t pay directly, so there’s a ton of administrative bloat.
If we could just cull the insurance companies we could harvest their organs and solve a lot of problems.
In the US, they would never even consider giving you ten minutes as a walk-in, and the next available appointment would be three months from now
3 months?! That’s impressive. I’m waiting until December for an appointment I’ve needed since March.
One time I had to schedule a doctor’s appointment so far in advance that by the time my appointment was coming up, I knew it was going to conflict with my final exams. The semester hadn’t started when I made the appointment. When I rescheduled, it was going to be another five months. So I said fuck that, and that was nearly two years ago. Not sure what the answer is supposed to be.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s far from all rosy in here. Specialist visits are hard to come by, I got one for next year, and only by calling over and over to check for any cancellations, got lucky to have it moved to next month. Still got another one for next year, no luck moving it so far.
But otherwise GPs are like that: 10min visit every week with an appointment, or a home call if you got a documented history, or… well, as a walk-in you either go to the ER, which gets everyone through triage right away, but after that can take hours for someone to see you (some even have died waiting, mostly during the pandemic), or have to wait until the last appointment at the local clinic.
It’s been getting somewhat harder over the last couple decades, and they keep trying to do some cuts to push for private insurance, and some services are still not covered (like optician, therapy, or dental only covering extractions) but so far the GP and ER are free for all and reasonably accessible.
