Submitted 1 day ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to workreform@lemmy.world
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It’s called triage. If you go in with a splinter you’re going to have to wait behind the guy that came in after you with a piece of rebar through his skull.
Lots of people don’t understand that it isnt a deli counter where you take a number and are called in order.
Many of these conservative “studies” compare wait times between Canadian booboos and American traumas without explicitly calling it out, and that’s not a fair comparison.
In the US, if the wait time is ever quicker it’s because a lot of people who SHOULD be there just died at home or at least tried to tough it out and will live with those consequences for the rest of their lives.
And yea, conservatives(lowercase, to not exuse anyone not in the Conservative party) are constantly fucking over our public instiutions. That includes healthcare, and frankly those politicians doing the damage are just murderers for hire. We have to do better, but at least we aren’t the US.
if you are waiting 12 hours in the ER then you are probably there for a runny nose or something silly.
I went to the ER in the US for an infected gallbladder full of stones, it was so bad I had to be hospitalized for almost a week. I was in the ER waiting room in the fetal position for literally hours after a nurse took my vitals before a doctor saw me, there were a couple other people in the waiting room. I nearly died. Over $20k bill after insurance.
I’ve also gone to the same ER with relatively mild UTI, I peed blood and fainted from the sight but otherwise didn’t really need the ER. They saw me immediately, and it was very busy.
Triage is a thing, whether they do it properly is another thing.
Also, you don’t know what happened an hour before you showed up. Triage doesn’t mean a serious case doesn’t have to wait or a minor one does.
you are probably there for a runny nose or something equally silly.
It’s silly to go to the ER for a runny nose if you have better options, like a family doctor with whom you can get appointments within a few days. Sadly, a lot of Americans don’t have health care coverage and have to go to the ER for “silly” things because they don’t have other options.
Very much this.
I’ve had seven heart attacks.
When I go in with heart attack symptoms, which I’ve had to do a handful of times (that it turned out not to be a heart attack, I mean) - I don’t like going in there and them getting me back quickly. It means things are potentially bad. heh.
I understand that nobody likes waiting, and i’ve waited before and it sucks. But it sucks less than needing to be taken back quickly, really.
Seven heart attacks? Youch.
Anyhow, IMO, the worst experience in the ER is when you have a bone or muscle injury. You’re triaged pretty low because it’s not getting worse so there’s no urgency to treat you quickly. OTOH you’re in a lot of discomfort, you often can’t find a way to sit so you’re not in pain. And yet, you really do have to stay in the ER. It’s not like if you have a bad cold or flu or something that will probably get better on its own, or where you might be able to leave and come back the next day if it’s really busy.
Exactly my brother came in with a cut bleeding all over the ER, he needed like 12 stitches. They took him right away. All he remember from that day(he was pretty out of it) was some woman complaining that she been waiting for hour why his getting to go first.
While his blood spilling out on floor she had the gull to say that.
Same with chest pain. If you go to the ER complaining of chest pain most times they take you straight back. Happen to me was sick told my boss chest was hurting he suggested hospital cause you know heart attack. Er by house so went they wisk me straight back.
Funny not funny story about that visit. One thankfully no heart attack. But they did find a mass on my lungs ( lucky turn out to be acid reflux due to a cough I had) anyway when he sees this he says. "Might be cancer but I don’t know. " scare the shit out of me. I just replied "well if you don’t know don’t say that. "
They scheduled me a specialist but it was a 2 month wait, by time they saw me the mass was gone. That doctor figured it was the acid reflux got in there. Good news is got on meds for that and no more acid reflux for me.
I can never understand how people can be that entitled. When I’m in the ER I’m always annoyed when someone comes in who clearly needs to be seen faster, but I couldn’t imagine complaining about it or even pretending that I’m being treated unfairly.
Went for heart problems. Waited 12 hours in an empty waiting room.
Canadian here its not silly, you can wait 12+ hours for very serious conditions (as I have once, I realize this is anecdotal).
This doesn’t mean its worse than in the states. I understand on average we are doing better healthcare wise than the states (interms of cost and mortality). However for the well insured in the states I believe the care is better.
Yet another issue with being so close to the states our health care suffers because our corrupt politicians see your system and drag us closer to it. You all also attract doctors away from us.
I think wait times were better. And now they’re terrible, but what you say plays a big role. And as such, we’ve seen urgent care businesses (hate saying that) explode. There’s one every mile where I live, including pediatric urgent care. And I’m not complaining. I’ll complain maybe about costs, but the idea of this stepped-down, non-emergent care, is a great way to deal with the problem.
Now, make it free* (except I pay taxes already so just use those).
People go to ER or get a prescription here sometimes. Then complain about the wait 😭😭😭
I wish I could agree with you, but one time I sat in an emergency room for 12 hours bleeding from my throat into a bowl that was overfilling with my own blood before I got properly triaged and scheduled for emergency surgery.
Definitely not Canadian
I remember when they sent me to an hospital from the clinic because it was possible I had something really concerning. I passed in front of everyone. It took 1 minute the second I talked to the reception. When they figured out it wasn’t lethal, it took some time… you know… to take care of the dying people.
Yep, there’s also priority insurance in EU, so they inflate the waiting time to make you pay more for insurance. They are definately trying to go the US way.
If Canadians waits in an ER, that means that what they had wasn’t life threatening and people with worse conditions took the priority over them.
If an American waits in an ER, it could be that their insurance company is delaying everything and hopes that they die so they don’t have to pay for treatment.
They are educated in triage, which is the only sensible way to handle emergency responses. A man with a sore throat should never take priority over a kid with a broken arm.
People think they are paying for medical attention, but what they are really paying for is their minor problems being taken more seriously than major problems that poorer people have.
Private for-profit healthcare, even in conjunction with public healthcare, is a blight upon humanity contradicting everything modern medicine stands for.
This was once the case in the US prior to EMTALA laws being introduced in 1986. Which is pretty dystopian, even if it’s not the case today.
And they wouldn’t even give you anything for the pain because the sacklers pushed opiates relentlessly got no consequences and now everyone is screwed
Hate to have to repeat this.
My late dad had a fell at home and broke his femur in two places.
Half an hour after his home fall alert was triggered, a team of paramedics was at his home. They got there before I arrived and had already stabilised and immobilised him.
An hour later he was admitted in ER, got checked and X-rayed.
Four hours later he was in the OR room, where they replaced half his femur with a piece of titanium. Then he was at the hospital for one week and then sent to a recovery clinic.
He paid zero € for all the process, including ambulance, intervention, ‘hardware’ and recovery.
Oh, this is Spain, not precisely the richest country in the EU.
Of course, if you go to ER because you’re sneezing, you will have to wait. But if you go to a private clinic using your private insurance you have to wait too…
It’s called triage. We do the exact same thing in the usa. And that’s the case whether you have insurance or not. They don’t even know if you have insurance at this step of it, to be honest.
They do know if you have insurance in most cases but it’s against federal law to discriminate based on insurance coverage based on EMTALA and the civil penalty is over $100,000.
necessito aprender espanyol.
Ah yes, this classic lie.
I fondly remember back in the olden days of news-papers reading an article that very fairly and balancedly compared ER wait times in the US to specialist referral times in Canada to show how badly socialized medicine was failing. More than zero people read that article and thought “USA! USA!” then went on to vote and share their ideas with people.
Then there was a big splash with a “”“study”“” that actually compared ER times to ER times and the US freaking dominated!!! Of course, if you read past the headline you’d find cherry picked cases of “bleeding to death” in the USA versus “sniffles” in Canada.
Point being, there are many ways to lie and these bastards will try all of them.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
You can use statics to prove anything. 39% of people know that
You can tell these people have never visited an ER in the US when they post shit you could tell was a lie just by accidentally glancing into any hospital window.
They don’t care. They just believe they have enough money to get priority in a for-profit system, at the expense of those who have less money but actually need urgent care.
As an US American living in Germany: socialized healthcare or death. Fuck the US system. It’s designed to torture you to add money to a billionaire’s pocket.
Italy, socialized healthcare:
Last year I got involved in a crazy car accident that left me with serious injuries.
1 hour after the accident I already had the first MRI done, a specialist surgeon saw me, determined that my injuries needed a second MRI and a CT scan but that they were not life threatening. A couple of hours later I had all the required tests done and assigned a bed in a room to start recovering. 3 days later I had back surgery and some more days in the hospital to rest. My injuries were not life threatening but the OR was ready for me from the moment they called the hospital saying they were bringing a multi-trauma patient.
In a few months from now, I’ll have to go back to remove the bars they put in my back to keep the vertebrae in place.
The total cost of the whole ordeal was exactly 0€ (unless we want to count the book I asked for to read something during my stay).
Fuck the US healthcare vigorously with a spiked stick. If this happened there, I’d be better death because the debt I’d have now would be insane.
Dead* not death,
Godamn I envy this
My bad, was probably a typo when typing while talking IRL 😅
“Pedo Daddy told me to hate Canada so now I hate Canada.”
Canada needs to stop taking these comments seriously and learn to stop punching down on the USA. Our healthcare system still has a lot of room for improvement.
And the reason for that is the aggressive privatization efforts done over decades by conservatives and many liberals.
I.e. Americanization
In America, I pay for health insurance that I can’t use because I can’t find a fucking doctor! Seriously, I’ve been trying to get a PCP for years but everyone I call is not taking patients. I’m on several different waiting lists.
Last time I went to the ER with an actual emergency and they took me right in… no wait. So yeah, I’ll take it.
Yeah but like… Where do you live I guess
If you’re waiting 12 hours in the triage area of the emergency department, then you probably should have either gone to your primary doc, or an urgent clinic.
12 hours means either the waiting area is unusually full of extremely unstable patients, or you are especially stable yourself.
I get that not everyone has access to different levels of care, but urgent clinics exist to take the load off the emergency departments.
i dunno. last time i was waiting 12 hours in the triage area, my surgeon burst through the doors yelling at people for making me wait because he had a bed for me eleven hours ago. sometimes there’s a paperwork fuckup.
Unfortunately, you also have to advocate for yourself as a patient. Ideally you have someone trusted along that can help with that, but if you’ve been sitting there for hours, you need to find out exactly what’s going on. Especially if it is serious.
The first thing I noticed when I was over in europe 30 years ago, is the hospital waiting rooms are small compared to American standards in larger cities.
The reason: routine non-emergency care is handled at the clinics because those are free/inexpensive too. So emergency rooms tend to have less traffic as people don’t wait as long for care. Earlier intervention = better health outcomes.
The regular clinics had very short wait times. You could get a routine appointment within a few days. The clinic was busy but you weren’t waiting for 2-3 hours for a regular appointment. (Maybe 15 minutes).
That’s all very, very dependent on what kind of appointment you’re trying to get.
Want to see my GP/family doctor? 1-2 days, same day if it’s an emergency.
ENT? Month or two at most usually, unless it’s a super busy time for them. May need to go to one in another city of course.
Want to see a dermatologist? About a year, 2 at most.
Want to see a psychiatrist for free? No.
I went to the ER with heart problems. Waited 12 hours in a mostly empty waiting room.
If it’s so bad in Canada, and so great here, why is nobody in Canada demanding to switch to that great American last place healthcare?
There are unfortunately a bunch of right wing idiots in canada who absolutely are :(
Some people are, but universal Healthcare is almost universally accepted in Canada.
So they debate goes around whether there should be a two tiered system with private hospitals/clinics so rich people can skip the queue for surgeries, etc.
That’s a trap.
They’ll have our system soon enough, rural areas tend to be conservative and anti government because they care about themselves and family and don’t want to get taxed to pay for others
Others ultimately being those like themselves given rural costs a shitload more per person to offer any service to.
But we’re FREE, praise Supply Side Jesus!
I saw an analysis about this a few years ago where they showed that the wait time for care in Canada was generally less than the wait time in America for most stuff.
Certain things like non-emergency (but important) surgeries could take longer to schedule in Canada.
But that was years ago. Probably both sides have had changes since then.
The most important takeaway is that if you think wait times would definitely be worse with socialized medicine, you have fallen for conservative propaganda, you idiot.
Certain things like non-emergency (but important) surgeries could take longer to schedule in Canada.
Yeah, hip replacements and that sort of thing have a months-long or even years-long waiting list. But, most people waiting for those things can still live pretty much normal lives. IMO the wait is too long. But, people can get by walking with a limp until their turn comes up.
If the trade-off to get treated more quickly for that sort of thing is to accept the for-profit medical system of the USA, there are virtually no Canadians who would accept that deal.
As a Canadian, that’s about right. If you don’t have an immediate problem but go to the ER, it can be brutal. I’ve waited multiple hours in the ER before and my mom was there once with my uncle for I think longer than 12 hours.
However, if you do have an actual emergency then things are completely different. You get in instantly, you are treated extremely well and the medical practitioners you see will stop at nothing to help you. When there is no threat of cost, they do everything in their power to save you.
They all “know a Canadian” who comes to the US because healthcare is better.
Uh okay. Sure buddy.
The only reason that American ERs may get you in faster is because it is so fucking cost prohibitive that the only people there are either at serious risk of life or limb, or have chronic conditions and they are going to his their out of pocket max anyway. The people that should be going to the ER but don’t feel like they absolutely have to, aren’t.
And every ER in the US and Canada both prioritize people by need. You triage life threatening issues first. Then serious injuries. Then things that may have deeper issues. Then things you can treat now. Then things that you are just wanting to get checked out. Then things that you should have just gone to your primary care for. If you are waiting for 12 hours in either case, you definitely didn’t come for life saving care or serious injury. You might have to wait a while for an x-ray, cat scan or mri because those are always a bottleneck in every hospital.
If people were dying in Canadian ERs waiting for care, or getting chronic conditions due to delayed treatment, I would be concerned, but that is never the claim. It is always just about your precious time away from work. But how many hours is too many hours when you are recieving FREE care compared to a bill high enough to buy a new fucking car every year? Perspective, people.
I never understood the argument about waiting for ED/ER care in socialized medicine vs the US’s.
Everyone is triaged, everyone waits in the ER. The sprained ankle or sniffle goes last, the stroke is seen immediately. Every country’s medical system has medical mistakes.
Like the meme says, the US will bankrupt you for care - and in no small part because people will put off care until a condition is potentially serious because they can’t afford to take time off for it or the cost of the care itself.
Just reminding everyone that the actual average is $1500 for an ER visit.
Needs to be cheaper but this place likes to be okay with lying so…idk yelling at a brick wall.
There’s a difference between lying and hyperbole. The fact it’s above zero is the point.
👌👍 it’s okay when my side does it. It’s just a joke, ya know locker room talk. Totally just a joke 🤣.
Tag on another $1500+ for an ambulance ride, and add that the $3500 only accounts for the room, not any treatment.
…and the anesthesiologist will bill you separately.
You forgot the part where the anesthesiologist is out of network, but you were not told this nor were you offered any other options before your treatment, and now your bill has doubled.
UK here.
If you’re waiting 12 hours in a&e, your condition almost certainly is not life threatening. Sprained arm, or a bad cold? You’re potentially waiting a while. Head injury, or heart issues? You’re not touching a waiting room seat.
The NHS can be slow as sin for non-acute issues. It took almost a year to get a benign, but disruptive lump removed. Major complications while giving birth? Instant, full blown, treatment.
We still have some private medicine. The existence of the NHS keeps their prices and practices in check. It’s no longer “pay or die” instead its “pay for convenience”.
or $47000, depending on specific disease they have to aim their shotguns at
Waiting for 12 hours is worth it, if in return everybody receives the medical care they need!
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Canadian. Recently injured, reasonably severely.
Ambulance on scene, admitted immediately, consult, imaging, initial treatment and out in 3 hours. Multiple regular follow ups and imaging - none of which took more than an hour.
If you’re sick or injured you get seen pretty quickly.
As someone else put it - the system is really good at solving acute problems and saving your life.
Keeping you healthy - that’s more up to you (than it should be). It’s not close to perfect but I’d pick it any day over whatever it is in Lake Americaland.
gilokee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For real, that’s what triage is for. A lot of people go to the hospital for something they thing is serious but is actually minor. My ex started getting panic attacks at one point, and after taking him to the ER for like the third time and waiting like 2 hours he calmed down and we went home instead. People who are actually bleeding out or whatever will be seen first.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
yeah you basically never wanna do psych stuff in an ER unless the behavior is unsafe enough that they’re likely to end up there anyway. The only psych interventions ED staff know how to do is emergently drugging a person unconscious which is rarely necessary. You more likely want some kind of specific psychiatric crisis services but you still need to be able to communicate effectively enough to let them work out a basic safety plan because if you go in with “I wanna die nothing will ever get better and you can’t talk me out of that” they’re gonna get you sent to an ER.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
What in the commy sense is this?
ieGod@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Correct. Moreover many provinces have seen flagrant de-funding and de-prioritization of health care as right wing grifters attempt to purposefully erode public healthcare in a bid to prop up private care. This has led to availability shortages which in turn cause more people to seek ER assistance than they otherwise would, and hence the long wait times.
My hope is we collectively pull our heads out of our asses and see how fucked things are in the US and reverse course.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
our system here in Lake Statesiaville River is to send you down shit creek. some of us are lucky enough to get the family turding stick or a paddle.