tazzygirl
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For those of you under a national health system, I would love for you to chime in. Its been stated that wait times will get longer and people will die as a result of the pending Health Care Law.
I submit the following....
In 2007, the Commonwealth Fund released a report that compared U.S. health care against several other countries based on a variety of benchmarks. The data were principally derived from statistically random surveys of adult residents and primary care physicians from 2004 to 2006, in the following countries: United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. This is what the researchers found:
* Canada had the highest percentage of patients (36%) who had to wait six days or more for an appointment with a doctor, but the United States had the second highest percentage (23%) who reported that they had to wait at least this long. New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and the U.K. all had substantially smaller numbers of people reporting waits of 6 days or longer. Canada and the United States, in that order, also had the lowest percentage of persons who said they could get an appointment with a doctor the same or next day.
* The United States had the largest percentage of persons (61%) who said that getting care on nights, weekends, or holidays, without going to the emergency room, was “very” or “somewhat” difficult. In Canada, it was 54%, and in the U.K, 38%. Germany did the best, with only 22% saying that it was difficult to get after-hours care.
* The United States, though, scored well on physicians’ perceptions of how many patients experience long waits for diagnostic tests. 57% of physicians in the U.K, and 51% of Canadian physicians reported that their patients experienced long waits for diagnostic tests, compared to only 9% of U.S. physicians who reported the same.
* The U.K (60%) and Canada (57%) had the highest numbers of persons who had to wait four weeks or more to get to see a specialist physician. In the U.S., only 23% reported a wait of four weeks or more for specialty care.
* The U.S. also did very well on measures of wait times for non-emergency or elective surgery. Only 8% of surveyed patients in the United States reported a wait time of four months or more for elective surgery, compared to 33% in Canada and 41% in the U.K. Germany scored the best, with only 6% reporting a long wait for elective surgery.
The take-away message is that both the United States and Canada do pretty poorly, compared to most other industrialized countries, on how long patients have to wait to get a regular appointment with a primary care physician or after-hours care, but the U.S. does better than most on having shorter wait times for diagnostic procedures, elective surgery, and specialty care. Each of these countries, though, with the exception of the United States, has universal health insurance coverage, funded and regulated in large part by the government, so it doesn’t seem likely that government-subsidized health care, in itself, is the sole factor in determining how long patients are stuck in The Waiting Place. Other factors, like the numbers of primary care physicians and specialists in each country, may be more important.
http://getbetterhealth.com/wait-times-for-medical-care-how-the-us-actually-measures-up/2010.02.02
As well as this....
The Waiting Times Myth
When I discuss health care reform with friends, families, colleagues, or in public, the two most pervasive myths about health care outside the US are that in every other country, care is inferior and rationing is accomplished by intolerable waiting times. As I endeavor to dispel these myths, I am invariably told an anecdote about a person who died in Canada or England awaiting some procedure or other.
Dispelling these myths is two-fold: first, pointing out the rationing that occurs in America either by private health insurers or by lack of wherewithal to afford services, and second, by pointing out that there are more health care systems than “ours” and “theirs.”
Given that an estimated 45,000 Americans are estimated to die every year due to lack of access to health care services, rationing in America is particularly troublesome, and oddly overlooked. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it is the lack of drama and, paradoxically, the pervasiveness of this experience, especially to those of us in health care. Anecdotes are powerful things, and so I have to always tell a few of my own to counter the horror stories they’ve heard about other countries. So, a few cases of my own: a man who puts off seeing a doctor (for what he knows is diabetes), ends up in the ICU critically ill, because he is trying to get on a health insurance plan and hopes he won’t be found out; a down-sized engineer with a year long persistent cough and weeks of coughing up blood, who waits until he is near death to come to the hospital because he can’t afford to see a doctor; and finally a young man with a seizure disorder admitted twice to the ICU for unremitting seizures in just a few months because his neurologist won’t see him because he’s been underemployed and couldn’t pay his last bill. Multiply my stories by nearly a million physicians in America and you see the magnitude and pervasiveness of the problem.
Beyond anecdotes, there is actual data, such as the Commonwealth Fund study showing that "U.S. patients reported relatively longer waiting times for doctor appointments when they were sick, but relatively shorter waiting times to be seen at the ER, see a specialist, and have elective surgery.” Additionally, Americans are less likely to have a regular doctor, less likely to get prescriptions filled, less likely to get follow-up care, less likely to keep a doctor long-term, and have a harder time getting taken care of nights and weekends. In another report, the Commonwealth Fund has shown the US ranks 19th out of 19 countries evaluated on preventing deaths that are amenable to adequate health care, an excellent measure of the overall performance of a country’s health care system.
That there is more than one country outside the US with a unique health system, might surprise some whose rhetoric suggests a vast wasteland of a series of Soviet style medical gulags. OECD data shows that waiting times are a problem in some countries, but only about half of those in the OECD. The others are like the United States in lack of significant waiting times, but unlike us they manage to do this with their entire population covered, and at significantly lower costs.
Now, let's do a little thought experiment. Say you are in a country that has relatively high waiting times for elective procedures, say Canada (but not England so much any more!). Take one sixth of your population and deny them access to care because, oh, they don't deserve it. What do your waiting times look like now? Take another sixth or so, and tell them they have to choose among school, dental care, glasses, food OR preventive health care. Or even life saving health care. OK, now how are your queues? Much better I expect. But what happened to your people?
By Dr. Christopher Hughes
http://www.drsforamerica.org/blog/the-waiting-times-myth#.UKcBGeTAfv4
I submit that our health care system isnt worth shit at this moment. The US doesnt even track wait times like other countries, so its very much like comparing apples to oranges. Yet the bolded part above says it all.
< Message edited by tazzygirl -- 11/16/2012 7:14:47 PM >
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Medical wait times by country - 
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) I had a chiropractor i would see and I would only be with him for like only a few minutes for him to get my back cracked, so I would call up his office and usually be able to see him in an hour or certainly that day.. 
Canadians dont like to hear they have a 2 tier system but they do.. If you are a hockey player or pro athelete, you can get what you need now, if you are hurt at work, you get in now.. if you want to travel to another province and pay yourself, you can get in now, if someone else pays for your procedure (which is a loophole) then you can get in now (you can not pay yourself, someone else has to).. and of course, if you want to pay 2 to 4 times as much you can travel to the US and get in faster.. 
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