| According to the very non-partisan Business Week:
--Wait time to see a dermatologist to examine that suspicious (cancerous?) mole: 38 days, but 78 days if you live in Boston
--Time to see an orthopedic surgeon for that painful, inflamed knee: 43 days in Los Angeles, 17 days in general
--26% of adults, 1 out of 4, went to an emergency room just because the wait times in the U.S. are unmanageable.
--Only 47% of U.S. patients could get same or even next day appointments. In all fairness that percentage is better than Canada's but worse then every single other country in the survey!
--We were 2nd out of 6 nations on getting a hip replacement or other specialists quickly, but Germany was 1st and they have universal single payer. This proves that a single payer nation can be more efficient than us. We can do things as well as Germany, can't we?
--We led the other 6 nations by a huge margin in one category. 51% of Americans never visited a doctor. received any medical care, or got any prescriptions for a whole year because of cost.
--According to the reputable New England Journal of Medicine we wait 2 weeks for a knee consultation and the Canadians wait 4 weeks, but the satisfaction conclusion after the final surgery is key:
Conclusions Waiting times for initial orthopedic consultation and for knee-replacement surgery were longer in Ontario than in the United States, but overall satisfaction with surgery was similar."
How about all those Canadians flocking across the border to avoid wait times? Well, they did a study of hospitals in Michigan, New York, and Washington that bordered major Canadian provinces. You can read about it in this primer
During this period, these
hospitalizations represented only 0.23% of all the hospitalizations that occurred in the
three provinces bordering these states.
Two last items. It is hard to get an extensive handle on U.S. wait times because of the disjointed market there is no reporting. I have cited reputable, rigorous studies that were done with incredible thoroughness. In Canada wait times are all collected and made public.
And finally, our wait times for specialists might be low, but that only applies to the insured. For millions upon millions of Americans wait times for a hip replacement, for example are infinite. |
