How long is an average waiting time in an emergency waiting room in America?
I can only speak from my own experience.
The wait time has decreased to minutes in our local emergency departments.
I've visited the community hospital and the level 1 trauma center with my dad several times in the past few years.
Each time he was triaged into the ED within minutes...whether it was a major or minor crisis.
We live in a very dense area, so I would expect the wait time to be longer.
That's amazing to me. Here in the greater Toronto area, it is very rare to go to an emergency room and see a doctor in less than five hours. Some nurses have told me that at times, patients have waited over 24 hours to be seen.
Also, if your doctor refers you to a specialist, it will be at least a month before you can get it to see him.
So, let me paint you a picture of our nationalized health care system.
One day you notice that you have a lump of some kind in your abdomen and it hurts. So you call your family doctor to make an appointment. He can't see you for three weeks. You can go to a walk in clinic, but your doctor's office discourages that, so you decide to wait.
You see your doctor three weeks later, and he refers you to get an ultrasound. You ask him if you should get a ct scan as well, but he says no (they are too expensive, you see). So you wait for a month to get an ultrasound and you see your doctor two weeks later. He tells you that the ultrasound was inconclusive and that he's like to send you for a barium xray and a barium enema. It's another month before you get these tests.
You go for the tests and wait two weeks to see your doctor again. He guesses that you have Chrone's disease. He sets up more tests for a month from now. Meanwhile the pain in your abdomen is tremendous. You stop eating because you can't go to the bathroom and chances are you will throw up after eating. Meanwhile, you have faith in your doctor and hope that the tests he's booked for you will help him once and for all get to the bottom of your problem.
About a week later, you can't stand it anymore. The pain is too great and you are throwing up constantly from it. So you go to the emergency room and wait for six hours to finally get seen. You are admitted to the hospital. They give you all of the tests you can imagine and they have the results for you five days later. You have lymphoma and will have to spend the next 8 months in the hospital, undergoing chemotherapy, surguries, and every type of horror.
But they save you. Miraculously. If you had been diagnosed properly 3 months ago, you would have been spared much of this ordeal. But you get out of the hospital. You're not strong and you are prone to infections. Furthermore, the surgeries you had have caused scar tissue in your intestines, and this causes obstructions from time to time. So you have to go back to the hospital every now and then.
You would like to go to the states for medical procedures, but that's frowned upon. So you stay in Canada and take your socialized medicine. And pray that nothing happens to you too quickly or too unexpectedly.
Topic: Nationalized Healthcare... (Read 2399 times)