How is this a thing when there are conditions that could likely get drastically worse in between the symptoms showing and the actual appointment date? And also people getting no assurance it’s not something life threatening causing extra anxiety and stress?
I have no expertise in economics or the medical industry so I’d appreciate any insights.
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Other posters have touched on a couple of the factors involved, but one I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that establishing care with a new patient takes longer than seeing a patient you have seen before. It takes more time to go over what the patient’s previous medical history is, what they are seeing a specialist for, what else has been tried around this issue, and so on. When I was scheduling for a specialist’s office, a standard patient checkup was a 15 minute time slot (of the physician’s time, not how long the patient was there in the office). But a new patient appointment was an hour. The doctors couldn’t see too many new patients in a day, or they wouldn’t have enough time to see the other patients. So each doctor only had one or two ‘new patient’ slots per day in their calendar. It didn’t take much time at all for those appointments to fill for months out.
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