Anonymous — and i also hate waiting in doctor’s offices for two hours.ughh
Anonymous — Waiting in my doctor’s office long past my appt time… This patient is quickly losing her patience!!!
Anonymous — The doctor will see you now. That was forty minutes ago. Come on retinal guy. Obama said my health would be better.
Anonymous — Waiting at the doctor’s office
Anonymous — doctor’s appt is taking forever
Anonymous — waiting on this doctor
I decided to run a small test this morning. See a pattern here. These are tweets from the past TEN MINUTES on Twitter. In ten minutes there were an over-abundance of people complaining about waiting at the doctor’s office.
What can Twitter tell us about our visits to the doctor’s offices? Well, we hate them it would seem. We’re tired of waiting weeks to get into the doctor, just to wait hours past our appointment time just to see the doctor. With a universal health care plan, this might only get worse.
According to the New York Times, when Massachusetts switched over to a near-universal health care plan, the time that patients waited for the doctor increased dramatically. With the new Mass health care, more and more established primary care doctors are shutting their doors to the newly insured, choosing to stick with the patients they have and nobody else.
The wait time not only increased in hours and days, it literally increased in months. The average wait time to get in and see your family physician in Mass is 44 days! Some patients are waiting 100 days to see their family doctor! I’m pretty sure that whatever flu symptoms they might have had at the beginning of the 100 days are now an outbreak of the swine flu that has infected the entire neighborhood.
Massachusetts had added about 440,000 people to the insurance rolls since the state began requiring people to have insurance, which is subsidized for those with low incomes. That has led to the nation’s lowest rate of uninsurance — estimated at 2.6 percent — but also to a surge in demand from newly insured patients who may have deferred care for years. (NY Times)
So how is ObamaCare going to deal with this shortage of doctors when nearly 50 million Americans could get insured under his plan? I guess that’s still being figured out. At Associated Press says that there might be a boost in the loan repayment plan for students planning to go into primary care, or perhaps a salary boost for those doctors to keep them in competition with the specialists who are making far more than their primary care partners.
As part of his health care overhaul, Obama has stressed the need to “elevate the profile of family care physicians and nurses as opposed to just the specialists who are typically going to make more money.” (AP)
What do you think? How long do you have to wait to see your family doctor in your town? We’re interested to know your story and how you think the lack of primary care physicians will affect ObamaCare.
And don’t forget to check out http://www.noinsuranceclub.com. As a member of the Club, you are a VIP patient and you don’t have to deal with the long wait times. It’s that simple. Call and get in to see your doctor. Shouldn’t all health care plans be that easy?
