alt Hacker NewsThis is frequently true in the USA as well. My provider's dermatology department is pretty backed up and couldn't make me an appointment for an excision until November. Fortunately it's not urgent.
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nxm • yesterday at 4:14 PM
Do you have any more evidence than this anecdote - pretty much any specialist is available this week in my area. Did you check ZocDoc?
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slibhb • yesterday at 4:25 PM
Anecdotes aside, here's some data:
https://benchmarkcanada.org/Governing_Healthcare-Wait-Times....
The US does far better than the UK and Canada.
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Agreed, it was 2-3 months wait to get to see an ENT for me last year. My daughter's regular eye check identified a problem and it's 3 months to get her into an eye specialist to review it.
Somewhat related: a couple years ago my spouse had cancer, and the doctor could do surgery either 5 days after our insurance was changing companies, or 2 months after that, those were the next two openings. The insurance said that if we proceeded with the surgery, without the new insurance company giving us approval, but they couldn't start approving it until the insurance started, and the pre-approval from the other company didn't give us anything. We finally decided to go ahead with it and take on the risk of ~$70K if it was denied. Which we decided to do rather than my spouse spending a few months worrying. Turned out that was a really good call, because when they did the surgery it turned out that instead of the expected slow growth, it was actually growing extremely fast. That was probably the difference between it being fatal and it being treatable.
The US system is far from smooth.