[fisherjeff]

I’m lucky to schedule an appointment of any kind less than 8 weeks out, unless there’s a cancellation. Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.

I live in a rural area and there’s a hospital system here that owns basically all the providers - everything is all remarkably expensive and booked out way into the future. There’s a smaller independent provider that I recently looked into but they’re scheduling new patients out by more than a year!

[tptacek]

There are apparently more MRI machines in Pittsburgh than there are in all of Canada. Access to imaging is very definitely not a comparative weakness of the American system; most analysts would say part of our problem is we do way too much imaging.

[fisherjeff]

Agreed. MRI machines are not the bottleneck - we have 3 in my area, serving maybe 100k people. Assuming most people are like me and spend about an hour in an MRI machine every 40 years, we should be at something like 25% utilization, which seems comfortable.

[willhslade]

The Pittsburgh thing seems to be an AI slop mistake.

[FirmwareBurner]

> Recently, it took me like six weeks to get an MRI to diagnose a broken pelvis.

Bruh, where I am in European socialized medicine land, six weeks wait for an MRI is rookie numbers. How about 6-12 months. Sure, you might die until you get your turn, but at least it's "free"*.

*) paid form everyone's taxes

[fisherjeff]

Six weeks is also very far from “immediate”

EDIT: Spot checking in a Canadian town with similar demographics as my own shows wait times roughly comparable to mine, and nothing anywhere near 6-12 months - worst case is about 14 weeks.

[const_cast]

The US medical system is objectively bad, period. It's not even an argument so please stop trying.

Not only do we pay significantly more, but we have significantly worse health care outcomes. The hallucination and delusion that Americans get "good healthcare" because they pay so much is just not true. We, objectively, get worse healthcare.