This week I helped a friend access healthcare in America. She has health insurance from a national provider. She is a recent legal immigrant (from a place with good national health care) but had little idea how getting a doctor here actually works. She had come down with a terrible case of shingles, which had spread across her face and back and was moving toward her eye. But she had no primary care physician. After three ER visits she still had no referral. The emergency room dispensed only minimal pain medication and told her to find a primary care physician on her own. None she called would accept new patients before a six-week wait. We finally, using a combination of sweet talk and some advanced begging, found a rare doctor willing to put the patient ahead of the paperwork. She recovered.
For many Americans, the challenge is no longer only paying for health care but finding a clinician who is available to provide it in a timely manner.
A 6 week wait for a new patient is not new. I ran into this situation over a decade ago when I moved my aged uncle from Nebraska to New Mexico in 2007. As I contacted local doctors in my NM town; it turned out it was a 6 to 8 week wait. This wasn’t a problem for us as the move required repeated trips back and forth from Nebraska. I got his Nebraska doctors to do a final visit while we were in Nebraska. And he did not have any urgent medical needs.
But in discussion with my geezer & geezerette friends there is a problem of getting in to see a doctor if one has a somewhat urgent medical need. The best they have been able to do is a next week visit. Sometimes they get fed up and go to an urgent care facility to get same day treatment.
I started this thread to see what your personal experience has been when you believe you had an urgent need to see your doctor.
I can get an appt with my ZoomCare physician associate within 24 hrs. And the google she has on her laptop is one of the best doctors I’ve had in 25 years.
I’ve waited as long as 6 months for a referral to a see specialist. But now that I’m on traditional Medicare and I know my out-of-pocket cost is capped at $3,000/year no matter what I do, I’d be more willing to go to the ER if I had to.
I’d gnaw off a limb before I’d go to the ER when I had for-profit health insurance.
Answering your question quite literally, I haven’t had a visit to a primary care physician/GP for an emergent, unexplained medical issue since I was child. Since comingto the US, despite dh and my recent issues, doctor’s visit such as we’ve had didn’t really highlight the growing primary care problem for us as with the few moves we’ve had since living here, husband’s speciality has given him both the network of local PCPs and the insight to view their capabilities from the quality of referrals and care that patients had received prior to finding themselves in his department.
In planning our move to Colorado we initially expected to find ourselves in much the same position as most, as it was supposed to be a retirement move. Not to be, as it turned out. Just as well as our previously dormant issues surfaced here.
We actually had the customary month or so wait time for our new patient visit. No big deal for either of us. By the time our emergent problems began we were already patients of record (with those temporary fictious diagnoses on our rap sheet as I mentioned earlier) and dh’s very recent onset heart murmer was picked up on routine annual visit.
Since we’ve become patients with genuine diagosable issues (and ICD codes to match this time) we’re under good surveillance. Here’s the thing, though…as thorough as our own physician has turned out to be, I don’t know what sort of diagnostician she would be if faced with a weird constellation of vague symptoms that might be nothing…or something really big.
Fortunately for me, I’ve got my husband…who’s adept at spotting the zebras among the overwhelming sound of hoofbeats and, even more fortunately, can tell when Dr Google (and even his buddy Claude) has it dead wrong.
I think primary care…as in actual care and not a box checking, referral service…is under similar pressures “globally”
Didn’t read the article, but would suspect that aging/retiring demographics plays just as big a role as in any other profession. Plus, there are easier ways to make a living.