Over Four Year Wait For a Neurologist
Oh, you thought this occurred here in America? Silly goose. No, our system is just unaffordable due to the insurance companies and the fact that a true free market model is NOT allowed to work. That being said you can get into a specialist’s office in a reasonable time. No, this is all about Canada and their “perfect” system. Read more if you like but our population would not accept this whatsoever, which proves once again socialized medicine would never work here.
The only wait I’ve seen here in Canada like that is for the neurosurgeon who does DBS for Parkinsons, everything else is well under a year, and even then only if nonurgent, except joint replacements take a bit longer, and approach two years some places. I’m not saying that’s acceptable, but it is nonetheless limited to certain situations. So I looked up the neurologist (his name is on the fax info line), and guess what, he is setting up a DBS program! So now we have something laughably worse than our wait for joint replacements, and I suspect these impossible wait lists are part of the plan to demonstrate to the powers that be how much they are needed. NO it’s not perfect here and Ontario especially has a lot of migration due in part to problems with how government treats doctors, but it’s nothing like the way you feel when you work hard all day not practicing medicine because you’re doing what your employer or the payer wants. Apart from rarely having to consider a patient’s financial situation in my medical decisions, I most enjoy the luxury that I never have to chart anything I don’t want to chart. If I had a better memory and thought I could function well that way, I could scribble one or two illegible lines for every visit no matter how complex, as many do. (Primary care that is, no one reads our notes except the locums, but unfortunately it’s also true of the emerg docs) All my work is stuff beneficial to patients, not employers, not insurance companies with extremely rare exceptions, even the after hours stuff. It makes it much easier to do. I have yet to see a patient suffer from not being in a US style system, and many that benefit. Well, except the guy waiting for DBS, and the fact that we don’t have a very good hospice system, (which the US has mostly because it saves money). I worry about overtreatment of the frail by the hospitals and specialists as much as I did in the States. My patients getting palliative chemo get dozens of MRI’s. A patient of mine who went to the ER because he woke up with two numb hands got into the acute stroke protocol, and saw several specialists and had several imaging studies in a few days (but no one told him how to treat carpal tunnel). Our few specific undertreatments and delays could be fixed with a small fraction of the extra the US spends over what we do.
Hell, that happens here already. I just had a patient die from ALS waiting for a neurology appointment (at an esteemed local teaching medical center) who was still waiting for her February 2018 appointment which was made last March.
“If your patient expires before their scheduled appointment please let us know so we can cancel the appointment and give it to another patient who will not live that long.”
Reminds me of a freshly minted orthopedist we had in town who wanted to “maintain a balance in his life” and therefore limited his practice to seeing 1 medicaid patient per month. I tried to refer a patient with a displaced clavicle fracture with nonunion and his staff gave the patient an appointment 6 months out. It was the last referral (of any payer) I ever tried to send him. He was soon perplexed that he was making no money at his practice and left town.
So does that mean you are in favor of forcing doctors to work for less than overhead? How many such patients should he be expected to take a month?
Back when we cared about fighting collectivism, on one of his first meetings with Gorbachev, Reagan goaded him with this joke: A Soviet citizen went to a car dealership in Moscow, and was told “There is a 10 year wait, and you go through quite a process when you are ready to buy, and then you put up the money in advance.
This man laid down the money, and the fellow in charge said to him: Come back in 10 years and get your car.
The man answered: Morning or afternoon?
And the fellow behind the counter said: Ten years from now, what difference does it make?
And he said: Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.”