Anyone who thinks we don’t ration access to healthcare in this country hasn’t visited their doctor lately:
Altogether, it was a wholly unremarkable visit to the doctor, but for the fact that I’d seen SiCKO a week before. I find now that I have become utterly intolerant of health care inconvenience, especially anything associated with my insurance. Sure, I might have had to wait as long in Canada or France (although the prescription would probably cost less), but that’s rather the problem; if you’re going to sell the US system based on convenience and short wait times, then it should be convenient with short wait times. It shouldn’t have taken me two months to get my prescription refilled, when both myself and my doctor knew that there was no other plausible outcome. By the end of the hour long wait, I was seething and ready to walk out, a state I doubt I’d have been in were it not for the Moore film. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s almost certainly his best, but be prepared to become more irritable on a regular basis.
I have taken to calling before I go to see if the Doc is ontime: mine never is, as he likes to chat and get a sense of how patients are doing beyond the symptoms that brought them in. I have waited as long as two hours.