I am certain that that is what the pro-socialized medicine faithful call the Wait Time Alliance
The 2009 report card released Thursday by the Wait Time Alliance, says there remains “much unfinished business,” in improving the amount of time between when a patient is referred by a family doctor to when treatment is provided by a specialist. The WTA is made up of 13 medical associations including the Canadian Medical Association.
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For cancer patients, the study found that the median wait time for radiation therapy was almost seven weeks, exceeding the benchmark of four weeks.
“If I have cancer, I don’t want to wait at all. I want to be a priority and not because I have money or influence, but because I need care,” Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Robert Ouellet said in a speech Thursday to the Montreal Economic Institute.
Patients are also facing long delays when they go the emergency department, the WTA said, waiting an average of nine hours to be seen and treated and for patients who needed to be admitted, the average wait time was nearly 24 hours.
“The longer wait for patients to be admitted is often due to the inability to find an available hospital inpatient bed,” the WTA said.
Seven weeks for an Oncologist.
Nine hours just to be seen in an ER.
Yet, American medicine is supposedly “broken”.
When my doctor saw something on a Thursday she didn’t like in a set of x-rays that followed a bout of pneumonia, I saw a Pulmonary Specialist the following Tuesday. The PS agreed and I was biopsied on the next Tuesday. The only reason I wasn’t looked at on the Thursday was because the procedure was a bit invasive and I would have had to sit out a pistol match that weekend.
Yes, I have medical insurance I pay for through my current employer, and yes, it took me 4 months to pay my portion of that bill off. However, I wasn’t left wondering for nearly two months if there was going to be serious trouble in my future. More importantly to me, neither The Mom or The Wife were left to worry about said serious trouble. Seven weeks of daily worrying would have possibly killed one or both of them.
Less than a decade ago, when I worked in the “government funded medical transportation” world (as I like to call it), we’d have people call up to be transported to the ER because their farts stunk extra bad. They’d get seen, be told they were being paranoid, and be back at home within a third of Canada’s ER wait time.
No, we couldn’t deny them a ride per my then employer’s contract with the county. Not surprisingly, after leaving said employ, no one in the media wanted to talk with me about the wasting of county medical funds by publicly housed hypochondriacs.
It is a fact of life that when something is “free”, people tend to waste it. Medicine will be no different, because to those to whom it is already “free” are already wasting it.
Found via the SayAnything blog