I completely agree.

I suffer from sleep apnea and I too had an issue with my CPAP machine. The NHS fixed it within a week.

I can’t imagine spending 2 years chasing different health providers to sort a simple repair.

Yes, Australia too. You can take my medicare system (NHS equiv) from my cold dead hands. It's the only way you're going to.

Though it’d probably take 666 days to see a sleep specialist and get your first CPAP machine… (which I suspect you’d agree is part of the stealth dissolution plan)

My sleep apnea went from initial visit to an NHS GP to a working CPAP machine in under 3 months.

This includes multiple consultations with sleep specialists and zero chasing from me.

Depending on how defunding worked so far in one's area, but NHS generally prioritised potentially dangerous issues.

Means it's easier to be frustrated waiting and then getting a 10 minute talk when it's flu or something similar, but get seen to in 10 minutes after arriving at a walk-in centre because you're worried of bine fissure in leg (turned out to be inflammation fortunately)

I went to A&E with symptoms of appendicitis. They took me in, put me in a bed, next day I was operated on, stayed one night and out the door. Everyone was great and seemed very competent.

This was on a three-day business trip to the UK, which was extremely unlucky, but the NHS was fantastic.

You got lucky. My father went to a&e recently with breathing problems due to some non COVID respiratory virus. He was struggling to breathe. They had zero free beds and he stayed overnight on the chairs waiting to be admitted. Eventually they found him a recliner.

And then of course you have the constant strikes and inability to even see a doctor at all unless you win the game of phone lottery.

The NHS may have a simple user interface, but it doesn't actually work when you need it so that's not very helpful. And the idea this is a Tory problem is propaganda. The NHS budget only ever goes higher yet service gets worse. Dumping ever more money into this third world system is never going to work.

Part of it is a Tory problem - when they changed how the funding gets distributed, so that overall bigger fund is divided now into smaller pieces that still have to cover the same population, but without the scaling benefits that previous allocation provided.

It's visible in other systems too, where for example you end up with local government politicians fighting for "prestige" or even perceived need to have a specific kind of hospital in their area, but they don't have a way to bring enough patients to support it, so you get a system too fragmented to sustain despite spending more and more money.

The NHS doesn't have a problem with too few patients anywhere. Just look at the chaos of the recently opened dentists that saw massive queues down the street, where police had to intervene to control the crowds. The reason: the dentist was new and accepting NHS patients.

A system that can't even provide dental slots without needing police to break up fights is a catastrophically failed system and it is a huge problem of the UK that people have loyalty to this dying corpse of a department.

It is a problem with funding when you need to break it down into smaller pieces because some very expensive things that are used by less patients now do not have support of budget for a larger area, and become an extra drain on the administrative region - because you still need to maintain neurosurgery units etc.

Suddenly there's less money for smaller, cheaper things.

And what is the alternative? For-profit systems?

Sure. Most parts of the world don't have the government run the entire healthcare system. It's an obviously bad idea everywhere To everyone except Brits.

I have terrible news about systems built on private health insurance (USA): it will still take 666 days to see a specialist, and you will need a referral from your PCP who may also decide they want to see you in person first. This may be its own scheduling nightmare. Then you may find out that your preferred specialist is out of network for your private insurance. The waits are a generally a supply and demand issue more than a beurocracies issue, but I can assure you that multiplying the number of beurocracies involved in getting healthcare doesn't speed anything up.

I've never had to wait more than a month to see a specialist in the US

I don't know about 666 days but my senior citizen parents complain about specialists where the earliest (non-emergency) appointment is 6+ months out.

They have figured out the right time in the morning to call every day to try to grab a canceled appointment slot but it takes dedication.

That’ll depend heavily on location and specialty. Neurology and dermatology book 3-5 months out for new patient visits in my area, from personal experience.

This is my experience as well.

LOLOLOL

that is not typical

LOLOLOL depends on the area.

I think it heavily depends. I know a friend who can only see her neurologist with a 3 month wait. Rheumatologists and specialized cardiologists are about the same issues. As an adult, trying to speak to a neurologist for an autism, ADHD, or learning disability evaluation is also a nightmare time-wise.

Last month, I tried to make an appointment with an endocrinologist. The first one I called had the earliest availability in July. The earliest one I could schedule was in March. and it's an hour and 15 minutes away from my home.

I couldn't find a single specialist who were taking new patients within 100 miles for my chronic condition when it was first diagnosed.

This sort of thing depends heavily on where you live, what your insurance coverage is, and the specific condition you're seeking care for.

In the Pacific NW for me:

- Dermatologist: 5 months

- Cardiologist: 3 months

- ENT: 8 months (turned out to be a useless appointment too sadly)

According to my PCP last week, endocrinologists have stopped taking in patients that do not have urgent issues and even then it's a 6+ month wait. He said 9/10 of his referrals to endocrinologists in the last year have been denied.

When was the last time you went? Nearly everything, even non-specialist, are booked out a month or more.

Mine are booked out forever because usable health insurance is far out of reach.

Car accident, holding steering wheel, airbag goes off and hyperextends my wrist way back. Thankfully, no tears. But ER does their thing, and I follow up with PCP the next morning, both recommending, and PCP referring me to PT "to start immediately", because I have barely any grip strength in what was my dominant hand.

I couldn't find a PT within 30 miles that could see me within "12-14 weeks".

I have several different specialists I've had to see and the minimum wait is 3 months, usually 4 to 6.

I dunno, I’ve just spent 18 months in Dubai, where I had private insurance, and it was a breeze. See a UK-trained specialist for almost anything within a day or two, and hospital direct billing meant I almost never had to interact with the insurer directly.

I guess my point is that as reassuring (as a Brit) as it is to know the NHS is there, private insurance isn’t necessarily bad if regulated well (and that matches my experience of having private insurance in the UK too), it’s just America’s seems incredibly poorly regulated.

A consistent theme in responses here is that how long you just wait for a doctor depends on location, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that the differentiating factor between locations where it is easy to see a doctor vs waiting a long time is how many golf courses are around.

Correlation isn’t causation of course. Not suggesting golf courses cause doctors. But in general in this thread I see people from heavily golfed areas saying ‘I found a doctor really quickly’ and people from golf deserts talking about long waits.

I wonder if richer areas tax NHS resources less or more. I could see cost-per-patient-per-year being less in affluent areas for a number of reasons

I think the critical element in the UK hasn't been regulation, so much as the NHS putting a hard price floor under everything that private providers offer. The two systems worked symbiotically. As / if the NHS is killed, private medicine will enshittify as well.

The NHS is a failed system that absolutely nobody is envious of, except brits because for some weird reason, they seem to think that the alternative is poor people dying in the streets.

Similar systems as the NHS have been introduced and subsequently canned in favor of more sane approaches in other European countries, which now have better (but still socialized) healthcare as a consequence.

There is no central european country with a similar amount of health care horror stories than the UK, and none where it plays a similarly important role in its identity. It boggles the mind.

"The NHS is a failed system that absolutely nobody is envious of"

...except people in the US.

People in the US, by and large, aren't envious of the NHS. For most people, if they've even heard of the NHS they have a negative opinion of it.

If you think the problems of US healthcare are caused by too much „free market“ and could be solved or even marginally improved by an NHS-style socialized replacement with even more government interference, you have never seriously investigated the issue.

In my experience people in the US aren't envious of the NHS. Most of us are aware that the grass is not green on any side of that fence.

People in the US would like a system that works. That means not waiting 666 days for a CPAP. It also means not having the government strongly nudge you to off yourself with its assistance, as in Canada. And it means not having an ever-increasing number of deaths by waiting, as with the NHS, which typically don't happen here for most kinds of care.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/30/national-tra...

Sadly, healthcare is expensive to provide regardless of who's paying. The NHS is able to provide even that troubled level of care because it pays its medical staff poorly by American standards, which it is able to do because it relies heavily on immigrants, which it is able to do in large part because those immigrants can't come to America and make 3x the salary since we make it incredibly difficult for foreign medical credentials to be recognized here. If we quit doing that tomorrow, the NHS would collapse by Friday.

I'd rather go the other way and not require a prescription for a breathing machine. They're not habit forming and you won't OD on breathing.

I agree with this. The sleep apnea world is kind of a weird racket; in order to buy $150 worth of electronics, you need to pay a doctor $5000 to interpret the results of a sleep test. Insurance companies require this because they don't want to waste money on electronics if there is no disease that needs to be treated. But of course, the testing costs them more than the devices. (And the devices aren't $150, because they aren't marketed directly to consumers, they're marketed towards insurance companies. That means you get to jack up the price because people aren't using real money to buy them.)

There was probably some argument for requiring a prescription when someone needed to adjust the pressure, but now that the machines do that themselves, they should probably just be available at Wal-Mart next to the reading glasses.

> And the devices aren't $150, because they aren't marketed directly to consumers, they're marketed towards insurance companies

Apropos of anything else, the newest CPAP machines are relatively sophisticated. They may not be worth the $1,100 they sell for, but definitely more than $150. $500, maybe.

> The sleep apnea world is kind of a weird racket; in order to buy $150 worth of electronics, you need to pay a doctor $5000 to interpret the results of a sleep test.

ENT too. I had a deviated septum. Most (all?) of my life. Finally did something about it when I was 40. Went to an ENT, who was great. "Yup, right nostril, 90% occluded". "Makes sense. So when do we schedule the surgery?"

He sighs, and with a roll of his eyes (at the process, not me), "Welllll.... first I'm going to prescribe you these two nasal sprays so that you can come back in 30 days and tell me that, to our mutual shock, they didn't realign the cartilage in your nasal septum. At that point, insurance will approve the surgery and I can have it done within 3 days of getting that approval back."

Thankfully, that went like clockwork. I saw him on day 30, and they had an approval and 34 days after seeing him for the first time, it was taken care of.

But what a fuckshow.

That sounds about right. I love your doctor though.

> despite the Conservative push to dissolve it by stealth

I'd question the "by stealth" part of this.

The NHS is so far behind the current science it's unreal. They're still using the 50% hypopnea defintion.