[hansonkd]

I like to tell people if you go to a carpenter to build a table, you'll get a wooden table. If you go to a stone cutter, you'll get a marble table. If you go to a welder, you'll get a metal table.

The trick is to know who to go to get what you want. In the USA with PPO there is generally zero friction to just making yourself an appointment with a speciality doctor and that specialty doctor will use his "toolbox" to create the outcome that you came to him and paid for. If you go to a psychiatrist, well their tool is prescription medicine, so that is what they'll use.

This sounds like common sense, but i think the population at large places too much trust in the doctor. In the US you have to be your own advocate.

[Apocryphon]

An idle idea I’ve had is that the healthcare bureaucracy in the U.S. can get so bad that one wishes one can hire a lawyer-type of role to navigate it as a paperwork proxy of sorts. But perhaps greater scope is needed- a personal medical advisor who has the domain knowledge, while being independent of the incentives that drive others in the health system.

I suppose in the past that would just be your family doctor, wasn’t it.