Ted Barlow reprises an old post about health care, and it is still just as relevant. Nothing new here: the Europeans do it better, our system is less efficient, with more overhead, and even the long lines. Quoting the Washington Monthly:
We should acknowledge the problems: waits for non-urgent types of care, and recent, damaging cuts … But waits are not uncommon in the U.S. Sometimes it takes six weeks for a new patient to get a routine appointment with me (Dr. Himmelstein); in Canada, that would be called a “queue”, in the U.S. it’s not called anything. At Cook County Hospital in Chicago, there are 10,000 poor patients on the waiting list for primary health care. Cook County doesn’t have the capacity, so most of these patients will never get care for their hypertension and other problems. Canadians get more doctor’s visits, more hospital days, more procedures, and more bone-marrow transplants than Americans.
I love that — we don’t have long “queues” for medical care because we don’t have lists. People just get scheduled for “appointments” which happen to be six weeks away. I just scheduled an appointment six weeks in advance myself!
