[vel0city]

People act like there are no wait times in the US.

I remember a few years ago, I noticed a mole on my arm suddenly looking very irregular. I kind of panicked, thinking it was potentially skin cancer. I have decent PPO insurance, no worries, I can go call up and schedule an appointment with a dermatologist directly. I live in one of the largest metro areas in the US, tons of doctors, should be a breeze to get it checked out.

I load up the find a doctor website on my insurance company's website. There's like 30 dermatologists within an hour or so drive from me, awesome. I start calling. Not taking new patients right now. Can't be seen for 6 months, 8 months, we could get you in next year. Next year, when I might have quickly growing skin cancer?

Luckily when I finally talked to my wife about it, she reminded me she had poked my arm with a permanent marker. Some solvent, and my mole looks normal again. I still make sure to keep my dermatologist appointments, just so I don't have to deal with the new patient issues and the "we're not taking anyone new these days".

I had a different issue with extreme nystagmus come upon me. Bedridden for days, I couldn't even open my eyes without having extreme vertigo. Calling ENTs to try and get help, none would be able to see me for weeks. Luckily a friend who works with ENTs managed to get a doctor to see me but if it wasn't for that I probably would have just had to suffer at home with no answers as to what was happening.

I now know that unless I'm practically about to die, seeing a doctor that will do more than run extremely basic labs and very basic healthcare is weeks away in the US even if you have decent insurance.

[_DeadFred_]

I paid out of pocket and went directly to a dermatologist in a week, where insurance wanted me to go through my doctor (my local doctor has no appointment times) first. It was skin cancer. I ended up bypassing insurance because I was scared to wait the months navigating their system would take. But also because it was supposed to be cheaper (I price shopped) than my deductible. Guess what, when you price shop, the price they tell you has no relevance to the final price.

[vel0city]

You lived out what I had only feared. I'm sorry that happened to you, this kind of thing shouldn't happen to anyone.

> Guess what, when you price shop, the price they tell you has no relevance to the final price.

I've found they often can't realistically give any kind of useful quote. I remember getting a total cost estimate from the hospital when my second child was born, anywhere from $20k to $160k before insurance, please sign here.

[terminalshort]

I think it must be very regional in the US. I have never experienced any wait times beyond a couple weeks once for an MRI.

[vel0city]

I can get an MRI in a few hours for a couple hundred bucks out of pocket. I can go get blood drawn in a half hour and lab results tomorrow morning. Tons of private labs and imaging centers are looking for anyone to fill the machine or get stuck. That's not the problem. The problem is getting an M.D. to read the results and actually tell me what's wrong and a good course of action.

In both examples, just getting an MRI would have told me practically nothing. Maybe for the nystagmus, it would have told me if there was significant brain cancer. Maybe a blood test would have told me something about cancer, but there's a good chance it would have been inconclusive, I needed a biopsy (or, in hindsight, a bit of rubbing alcohol).

[danaris]

It's going to be different by region, but also by health insurance plan, by provider, and by income bracket.

[yepitwas]

I've seen a case of both providers of ACA "marketplace" plans in a state each including only one of the four closest hospitals to me as "in network", with similar extremely-spotty coverage for everything else. And one excluded the massive children's hospital in the city that'd also gobbled up every pediatric care office in 50 miles, so there was, practically, only one insurer you could pick if you had kids (those two providers were the only ones offering individual insurance in that state at all, everyone else had pulled back to only doing group plans in that state; both were also companies I'd never heard of before).

This was in an actual city. Things can be even worse out in the sticks, where hospitals are much farther apart and often offer only some of the services you expect from a big-city hospital.

Lots of these plans also only cover a small geographical area, except for ER visits (which I think they have to cover). So don't get sick in a way that gets you discharged from the ER into a regular hospital bed, but still unable to get home, while traveling within your own country, if you don't want to go bankrupt.

Like it truly wouldn't have been crazy for someone on one of those plans to get some kind of travel insurance while traveling in the US. That's how fucked up our healthcare system is.