6 ms·
I’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diag
by fisherjeff 1y ago
I’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.
I live in a rural area and there’s a hospital system here that owns basically all the providers - everything is all remarkably expensive and booked out way into the future. There’s a smaller independent provider that I recently looked into but they’re scheduling new patients out by more than a year!
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago> Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis. Bruh, where I am in European socialized medicine land, six weeks wait for an MRI is rookie numbers. How about 6-12 months. Sure, you might die until you get your turn, but at least it's "free"*. *) paid form everyone's taxes
- fisherjeff 1y agoSix weeks is also very far from “immediate” EDIT: Spot checking in a Canadian town with similar demographics as my own shows wait times roughly comparable to mine, and nothing anywhere near 6-12 months - worst case is about 14 weeks.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI said I was form Europe, not Canada.
- fisherjeff 1y agoRight. I still don’t think your original contention that for-profit systems are, in general, orders of magnitude better than socialized ones is accurate, but I do concede that your particular situation seems pretty bad. EDIT: Just checked NHS too, most recent month had ~3% of MRIs waitlisted more than 13 weeks, so pretty similar in that European country as well.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI don't live in the UK either. That's linke me saying American wait times are not so bad and Googling data from Mexico.
- fisherjeff 1y agoI mean if we’re doing analogies here, I’d say it’s more like you said “the sky’s always blue in the US”, and I said “actually it’s kind of cloudy here right now, and in fact it’s often as cloudy as other places.” To which you just keep responding that I’m wrong because there’s a tornado outside your house.
- const_cast 1y agoThe US medical system is objectively bad, period. It's not even an argument so please stop trying. Not only do we pay significantly more, but we have significantly worse health care outcomes. The hallucination and delusion that Americans get "good healthcare" because they pay so much is just not true. We, objectively, get worse healthcare.
- tptacek 1y agoThere are apparently more MRI machines in Pittsburgh than there are in all of Canada. Access to imaging is very definitely not a comparative weakness of the American system; most analysts would say part of our problem is we do way too much imaging.
- fisherjeff 1y agoAgreed. MRI machines are not the bottleneck - we have 3 in my area, serving maybe 100k people. Assuming most people are like me and spend about an hour in an MRI machine every 40 years, we should be at something like 25% utilization, which seems comfortable.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoThats a pretty big assumption. How old are you? My elderly parents are getting MRIs once or more per year. They are very common in orthopedic medicine.
- tptacek 1y agoYes. That's probably a bad thing.
- s1artibartfast 1y agofrom a system cost perspective, absolutely. For specific beneficiaries, not so much, especially after they have aged out of paying into the system. This is a textbook challenge with the US healthcare economy.
- tptacek 1y agoNot just from a cost perspective: overuse of imaging, particularly in orthopedic medicine, is apparently a major driver of iatrogenesis in American medicine. It actively does harm.