this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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I live in belgium where it is 4€ to see a doctor and maybe 50€ to see a specialist.
Wait times are 1 day max. Wait times for a specialist are usually a month.
When I was employed by a big hospital living in the US, my wait times were triple that even with "great health insurance" and I would pay $350 for a checkup with something routine like shot updates or an STD screen.
That's because there aren't so many people in Belgium (yet). In Germany there are specialists you come on a waiting list and tell you that you perhaps get a seat in 2 years. Some don't even have a waiting list anymore. For rheumatologist I wait for 3 months minimum, as a regular patient there.
That literally doesn't matter. What matters is the ratio between doctors and specialists to people.
If nurses and doctors are tightly controlled (like in the US) and refused entry to the profession on graduation on the basis of "keeping wages high" (and then reducing their wages anyway) like in the US with the licensing board, you will ALWAYS have horrible wait times because they purposely radically understaff hospitals.
For example, in Belgium, dentristry ia rate-limited by having extremely strict entry exams such that they have like a 5% pass rate purely to try to not flood the market with dentists. Now it is almost impossible to find a dentist without an "inside connectin." It means dentists are almost unanimously rich, but at the expense of the people. This is not so for doctors.
I don't know what the licensing system is in Germany or what the study requirements are. In america, this is purely a capitalism problem. Hospitals are almost all for-profit. This means that they will intentionally run on the most barebones crew necessary and work them past the bone in order to extract the maximum profit per-patient (same thing is happening in almost every single manufacturing industry). There are mass strikes and quitting by nurses and doctors because they essentially get 14 days off per year and have to work 12-16 hour shifts, 60 hours a week because the hospitals are so ridiculously understaffed to increase profit. Doctors are salaried and often don't get paid for their extra hours. The same waiting lists exist in america for certain specialists, by design. Whatever problems there are with the medical system in Germany, I promise you they are much worse in America.