Seems in the middle for GPs and near the top for meetings with specialists. Canada is waaay back there.
It's outcomes that matter though, not wait times. I think people in the USA avoid seeking medical care more than in other countries because of the expense. That and other reasons lead to worse outcomes in USA vs most/all of the developed world.
EDIT: Oh I realize you agree with me. Sorry I was confused by "lower end of wait times", thinking you meant "lower ranking".
This is from your link
"A common misconception in the U.S. is that countries with universal health care have much longer wait times. However, data from nations with universal coverage, coupled with historical data from coverage expansion in the United States, show that patients in other nations often have similar or shorter wait times."
read beyond one sentence and look at the data itself, and of the countries evaluated the US is near the bottom for wait time length for all the metrics evaluated. Certainly not on the higher end of any list.
So a broad claim of the US having generally "higher wait times" is incorrect , no? I mean hell, % waiting over a month for a specialist was 27% for the US and up to 61% in Norway and Canada.
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.
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u/TheEndOfAllThings23 Aug 22 '26
Heart surgery. For privacy I don’t want to be more specific. It was necessary but not emergency.