alt Hacker News> Because even here in the US if you aren't fabulously wealthy with concierge medical you'll be waiting weeks/months to see a 'doctor'. And you'll almost certainly never actually see a doctor, you're going to see an overworked NP (no shade on NPs here, most of whom are great, just establishing how our medical system actually works in 2026).
But it's simply not true. my mom broke her back last year and before we realized that her back was broken, we saw an urgent care doctor, same day, within 30mins (I don't recall the exact timescale now, but it was pretty much instant). Who promptly gave my mom an Rx and told us to go to the ER. Personally, urgent care appointments have always been available within 2hrs, and even stuff like an xray (usually in a centralized office, so some travel required) is possible same day. This isn't special treatment.
If someone is waiting long for care, it isn't a problem with the system - and the alternative you speak of isn't going to solve the "I'm not a medical doctor" problem either, which is the main objection to the long wait-times. Minor hypochondriac-ness notwithstanding - nothing will be able to solve that completely - money is the back-pressure mechanism to avoid waste of limited resources. Whether anybody likes it or not, doctors/xray-machines/etc are not infinite (for now heh).
For-profit health-care insurance companies should burn in hell, though.
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Urgent care would not be urgent if you had to wait months. Hang out with a few elderly people who actually need to see specialists more than people like me. Over the years, I've heard plenty of stories from people I know waiting multiple months to see specialists.
30 years ago, you’d just call your GPs office and they would have told you to go to the ER. Instead your moms insurer paid $150 for an interaction that likely funneled you their medical networks local hospital and added low value.
Urgent care is a grift to replace a relationship with a doctor or practice with a lower paid, lower skilled NP. It’s more a sales funnel that anything.
I can do anecdotes too.
My father had his heart in afib for over 3 months straight as US hospitals and doctors jerked him around and set appointments weeks out before they finally removed his thyroid, despite a family history of thyroid problems and having multiple previous hospital trips for suspected heart attacks, which by itself should give the obvious conclusion that his thyroid needed to be removed.
Being in afib just for a few days can cause permanent heart damage, heart attack, and death. And even once they decided it should be done, it was another 2.5 weeks before they scheduled the surgery. I don't see how anyone can think the US medical system is any good for anybody but the obscenely wealthy.
No doctor in existence would consider that an acceptable scenario, but the profit driven investors seemingly had no problem with him dieing when they had more profitable patients to serve first.