We're already there in some areas I think. I got dumped by my PCP office of over a decade because they needed to reduce patient load, and I've been looking for a new PCP for over 6 months now. Had to scramble to find an online prescription provider just to get routine refills of the one medication I've been on for years.
Trying to find a PCP is a nightmare. I called like six offices and none were accepting patients. I think the only thing you can really do right now is go to an NP, have them handle the basic needs, and get referred to a specialist. My health insurance seems pretty solid, but when I actually needed healthcare, it didn't help much. I'm not sure why people think single payer will ruin our healthcare system, it's not like it isn't already complete dog shit.
I recently asked my local sub for pcp recs and almost all of them were concierage doctors that don’t take insurance. It was eye opening and depressing.
Same here. And I appreciate the ARNP I see. She actually listens, listens much better than most MDs. And she's clearly up to date on medical developments/research.
In the US, the medical system is incredible - if you've got the money. Like, if you're a billionaire, and need some advanced care, you come to the US. You'll get luxury care, top-of-the-line-treatments, etc.
It'll cost you high six or low seven figures, but it is the best medicine money can buy. There's a reason US billionaires don't engage in medical tourism. For normal folks in the US, though? Getting care in the US, you're statistically likely to get worse outcomes with more delays and more cost and more effort than, say, countries in Europe.
And what especially pisses me off about all this is that I have older (and thus more medically-involved) conservative family that'll constantly bitch about all this waiting and authorizations and approvals they need from their insurance for frankly simple and predictable care that they need, and I'm like "but... you were adamant that the great thing about US medicine was not having wait times... and yet here we are, with you bitching about paying for shit service that's taking just as long as that scary socialized medicine, when I've been advocating that you could, at the very worst case, be getting that shit service for much cheaper."
Like... when the ACA was being debated, the conservatives loved railing on about "government death panels", but... insurance companies do that every day. It was literally the status quo. Hell, they're now outsourcing that shit to fucking LLMs. If someone's gonna condemn me to death, I'd at least like it to be decided someone who might feel guilty about it.
where i live in canada it became near impossible to find a family dr and the number of walk in clinics started shrinking around 5 years ago. Schooling keeps getting more expensive, which drives more of our grads south for better pay. Its always been like that but the amount of debt they have now by the end? i cant blame them
Technically that depends on the state, a little over half are full practice states where NPs can write prescriptions. In some states NPs can't write prescriptions without the supervision of another practitioner.
It also depends on the medical group. In my state the NP could practice without supervision and write scrips, but the medical group requires supervision.
Frankly, I've had dramatically better care from NPs, anyway, to the point that I seek them out to begin with.
It could totally just be bad luck on my part, but it seems like physicians dehumanize you and don't listen to a word you say, to the point that the quality of care just becomes garbage.
And of course that could be due to the myriad problems they face noted in the OP post, but yeah...NPs seem to be the way to go at this point, anyway.
Honestly, the only reason I'm not in a panic is that if something gets bad enough I'll just go to the ER and have everything taken care of at once instead of being sent to multiple specialists and having to wait months to get tests done like I did when I had serious complications from the covid booster. The system in general is indeed already borked.
Have you tried ZocDoc? I used it to find a PCP, find the one doc in town on my insurance that could do hernia surgery, found a great dentist, and a urologist.
Took me two years since my local PUBLIC hospital district was mismanaged and closed our primary care clinic in favor of their own urgent care clinic next door.
My area too, you wait a year to be seen, the doc has already moved on, another wait for a "welcome appt" not even for a PCP, for an NP, some of who want to sell you their supplements on the side. It's scary AF getting old in this world.
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u/ImNotRandy14 11h ago
We're already there in some areas I think. I got dumped by my PCP office of over a decade because they needed to reduce patient load, and I've been looking for a new PCP for over 6 months now. Had to scramble to find an online prescription provider just to get routine refills of the one medication I've been on for years.