[ketzu]

> One account is that the US has too many medical facilities in urban areas. In other words, there might be five hospitals each with its own radiology equipment. That equipment is idle some of the time, so you could close some of the imaging departments and leave just one or two for the metro area. That would obviously inconvenience some people, but the gist of the criticism is that the US duplicates medical capacity for the sake of convenience.

> The other criticism is that there are too few clinics and such. That's why there was a big push to open health clinics in pharmacies and urgent care locations recently.

Funny enough, germany has the exact same two problems.

* Too many small urban hospitals do too many things, but have no speciality, leading to high cost, underutilization and higher risk procedures.

* Too few specialist doctors for checkups leading to long waiting times.