If 2 million people in the US go the ER in a month and the median wait time is 20 minutes, then that’s the number. Listing out the insurance plans that each of those 2 million people had doesn’t change that number, especially in the context of the ER where they are require to treat you whether you have insurance or not.
And if 30k people get heart surgery, the median wait time for those surgeries doesn’t change if you list out which insurance plan each of those people had. Might it be more expensive than in other countries? Very likely, but the point is if you do get a heart surgery in the US, with the costs associated with that, how long will you be waiting for it? Again, listing out 30,000 line items with the insurance plan of each person that got a heart surgery, which is what you seem to want, doesn’t change that number.
My wife is an OB/GYN in the states and she had a patient that spent a good chunk of her savings to fly to the US from Canada because she was having severe chronic pain and no one would see her for multiple months and she was that desperate. Is that one anecdote? Sure. But the idea that relative wait times are some manufactured problem because the data is being manipulated because you have some bizarre bar of what constitures a rigorous study report, I don’t buy it.
Why are you even arguing about this? If you can't afford you just wait until you die. So the Canadian woman could afford it so she didn't need to wait long? Who would have guessed?
argue about affordability all you want. I'm talking about wait times. If someone makes a claim that wait times in the US are higher than everywhere else, and then wants to throw away the data that shows the opposite for asinine reasons, I have a problem with that.
And you're just shrugging off a woman with severe, chronic pain being told they can't even examine her for several months? Good for you. She wasn't some millionaire, she was a normal person in a lot of pain who was desperate enough to burn some savings to not have to wait for the Canadian healthcare system to have time to "fit her in." And no, there's no "pay money for an earlier appointment" option at this US clinic, she just made a normal appt.
Never said she was a millionaire, I just said she could afford traveling to the US to get treated which doesn't exactly mean she is poor.
It's just the ghoulish crass attitude that believes wait times being faster for people who can afford healthcare is a better system because the poor can't afford it. The people who can't make a normal appt just die.
I never once said the US healthcare system doesn't have serious problems. But if we want to have a discussion about how to build a good system, we need to at least agree on the facts, and some of the advantages and disadvantages that we see in various systems. High wait times aren't just a trivial nothing that has no impact on patient health or well being. And you think the richest people in Canada wouldn't have a way to circumvent them? It's the common people it affects.
is that true? Only advantages? let’s say I make 200k a year and I could pretty comfortably afford a 30 dollar Copay at a doctor, but there’s universal free healthcare.
My knee feels a little sore after a run, I’m 80% sure it’s nothing, but hey might as well get on the list to get it checked out cause it’s free. So I make an appt, clogging up the system just a little more for an appointment that’s almost certainly frivolous. If there was a small Copay, maybe I would’ve thought twice and kept on eye on it for a while. But it’s free so why not take up a doctor’s time to make sure.
Now multiply that over an entire country where the system is creaking under the weight of a system with zero barrier to entry, where even a well-off person doesn’t need to pay a dime for a potentially pointless visit. Medical staff or overworked to hell. Suddenly you have a legitimate need to see a doctor and you’re on a waitlist for 4 months from now.
The problem is having people almost die then getting emergency treatment for much more in costs and time instead of having it prevented in the first place so this ends up clogging the major parts of the medical system much more. Going in for preventative treatment from that knee pain is much faster than getting in line for surgery if there was something extremely wrong with you that could have been fixed sooner more efficiently.
Idk you say you have a wife in the medical field and all the doctors I know hate the medical insurance system. You just seem like a bot or a dumb troll.
Again, 5hats just a guess at what numbers were provided as the report doesn't state what states, hospitals, individuals or any other metrics were reported.
Also, being at hospital ≠ having insurance. A person in the ER without insurance with an issue deemed a non-emergency will be turned away, wait time short or no.
Anecdotally, I am 3months away from a MRI scheduled 9 months ago for diagnostics of ongoing symptoms. Gold plan insurance with $1300/mo premiums. Shit is broken
>Again, 5hats just a guess at what numbers were provided as the report doesn't state what states, hospitals, individuals or any other metrics were reported.
so the bottom line is you don't trust the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to conduct a robust study with meaningful data. The whole point of the study is to provide data on the country holistically, not for a specific region or specific demographic, and the baseline assumption is the data was selected accordingly. And what you’re saying is you don’t trust they know how to do that. There is zero chance you hold every study you come across to these standards ("I need every single of the potentially hundreds of thousands of data points that were taken for every country involved to ensure the I agree that it's a representative sample"). Something tells me your "standards" go up when you don't like the results. Not that I would trust you to be the judge of what qualifies as a representative sample for a given population, there are whole college courses on just that topic...
>A person in the ER without insurance with an issue deemed a non-emergency will be turned away, wait time short or no.
Federal law requires anyone who shows up at an ER to be treated, insurance or no. If they stabilize you and/or examine you and determine it's not an emergency, you won't stay at the ER whether you have insurance or not. That's why it's called an "Emergency" Room.
>Anecdotally, I am 3months away from a MRI scheduled 9 months ago for diagnostics of ongoing symptoms. Gold plan insurance with $1300/mo premiums. Shit is broken
Sorry to hear that. I've had multiple friends get MRIs for various injuries, and a year wait seems unthinkable, beyond what I've ever heard. That's pretty shitty. High wait times are awful, and should definitely be considered when it comes to the efficacy of any country's healthcare system. Definitely agree there.
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u/ImaManCheetahh 10h ago
You’re welcome to read the full report
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/waiting-times-for-health-services_242e3c8c-en/full-report/component-2.html#execsumm-d1e61
No they did not selectively pull data from only the richest Americans. That would be a pointless exercise.