Long Waits for Doctors’ Appointments Have Become the Norm - The New York Times

Long Waits for Doctors’ Appointments Have Become the Norm - The New York Times: "The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care, compared wait times in the United States to those in 10 other countries last year. “We were smug and we had the impression that the United States had no wait times — but it turns out that’s not true,” said Robin Osborn, a researcher for the foundation. “It’s the primary care where we’re really behind, with many people waiting six days or more” to get an appointment when they were “sick or needed care.”

The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent). When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.

So it turns out that America has its own waiting problem. But we tend to wait for different types of medical interventions. And that is mainly a result of payment incentives, experts say."



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