Modern problems require modern solutions

The "free market" is so good at problem solving! I hope the entrepreneur who thought of this made a tremendous profit!

Imagine thinking the US health care system is anywhere near a "free market"

My dad used to say he had three piles of papers on his desk: "urgent", "very urgent" and "no longer urgent".

While it's mostly not quite as bad here in Norway, it's getting there.

Lots of GP's here are quitting because they've been overloaded by paperwork. Government wants more documentation on everything. Can't just trust "some random doctor" who's known the patient for decades to sign a few days of sick leave, nope, we need paper trail!

My SO's GP almost started crying during one of her checkups since he was so overworked. He'd have a normal day seeing people during normal working hours, then there would be at least 5-6 hours of paperwork to do. He quit half a year later.

The newly trained doctors have caught on and don't apply for open GP positions. The result is that we have a massive deficit of GPs which keeps getting worse day by day.

Death by paperwork is the symptoms of late-stage bureaucracy. In the early days of something, it's all fly-by-pants and everything is so good compared to the previous alternative that nobody cares, but as it gets more and more "finalized" the paperwork mounts more and more to "prevent" issues, because the issues the overload of paperwork causes aren't accounted for.

Ten patients die because there was no doctor to see them? Nothing important.

One patient sued because a doctor made a mistake that didn't even kill them? Hugely important, ten more pages of paperwork will have to be added; the paperwork won't prevent it happening again, but now it'll clearly be the doctor that is liable, not the practice/hospital/insurance company.

You must be psychic. I'll be 75 on June 8 of this year, and it occurred to me that scheduling old people for appointments a year and a half way is a frictionless way of keeping a full schedule that will only get lighter as geezers like me drop dead before we can be seen. Oh well...

Not psychic at all, unfortunately! I just upvote you a lot and keep and eye out for your (nearly always thought provoking) posts. IIRC, you said in the past you're a retired M.D., is that right?

If you live around the bay area, I'd love to buy you lunch sometime. You are indisputably a super interesting person, @bookofjoe! Email in profile, promise I'm pretty cool as far as humans go :p

Thanks for your kind words. Yes, I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years: 1977-2015).

I lived in LA from 1966-1983, when I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I've remained.

I'm easy to connect with: [email protected]

When I'm not acting out on HN, I do so in these arenas:

https://www.bookofjoe.com/ (since August 2004) https://www.youtube.com/user/bookofjoe (since March 2006) https://twitter.com/bookofjoe (since November 2006)

Reminds me of this little-known Seuss book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyrVyCqKwo

If it's not a scheduled appointment, but a "next available time" one, ask to be put on a cancellation notification if you're near the doctor's office; they get a cancellation, call you, you're there in 10 minutes kind of thing.

You must also be psychic! The day after I got my "see you in the future" 2025 appointment, I woke up and saw there was a text from the doctor's office offering an earlier appointment: it said to go to the scheduling portal and follow the instructions.

I thought, "huh." That was around 6 am. I mulled it over: did I even want an earlier appointment? I'm not a big fan of doctors (full disclosure: I am one). So I went about my day and finally around 1 p.m. decided it wouldn't hurt to have a look; after all, I could ignore or decline the offered new slot.

No worries: when I logged on around 1 p.m., the portal said the new slot was no longer available.

I wasn't sad.