I’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.
I live in a rural area and there’s a hospital system here that owns basically all the providers - everything is all remarkably expensive and booked out way into the future. There’s a smaller independent provider that I recently looked into but they’re scheduling new patients out by more than a year!
There are apparently more MRI machines in Pittsburgh than there are in all of Canada. Access to imaging is very definitely not a comparative weakness of the American system; most analysts would say part of our problem is we do way too much imaging.
Agreed. MRI machines are not the bottleneck - we have 3 in my area, serving maybe 100k people. Assuming most people are like me and spend about an hour in an MRI machine every 40 years, we should be at something like 25% utilization, which seems comfortable.
I’m in my early 40s and have had 1. Everyone I know well has had 1 or (more typically) none, including my parents and in-laws, so I figured ~2 lifetime MRIs would be in the right ballpark
Is it Boston? It's one of those cities. I went and Googled for it because I remembered hearing about it on Derek Thompson's "Plain English" podcast last year with Jonathan Gruber (the MIT health economist, not the Apple guy). I don't know if it's Pittsburgh or not, but it's not a made-up stat.
If you Google it, AI / Gemini says it's true, and it's Pittsburgh. If you go into the references, Canada has roughly 432 MRI machines and at last count Pittsburgh has roughly 142. But, you know, AI is going to take all our jobs. Or at least the ones where we email each other poorly researched urban myths.
> Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.
Bruh, where I am in European socialized medicine land, six weeks wait for an MRI is rookie numbers. How about 6-12 months. Sure, you might die until you get your turn, but at least it's "free"*.
EDIT: Spot checking in a Canadian town with similar demographics as my own shows wait times roughly comparable to mine, and nothing anywhere near 6-12 months - worst case is about 14 weeks.
Right. I still don’t think your original contention that for-profit systems are, in general, orders of magnitude better than socialized ones is accurate, but I do concede that your particular situation seems pretty bad.
EDIT: Just checked NHS too, most recent month had ~3% of MRIs waitlisted more than 13 weeks, so pretty similar in that European country as well.
The US medical system is objectively bad, period. It's not even an argument so please stop trying.
Not only do we pay significantly more, but we have significantly worse health care outcomes. The hallucination and delusion that Americans get "good healthcare" because they pay so much is just not true. We, objectively, get worse healthcare.