I was in the ER in the U.S. three times in 2022/2023. This is a town with two hospitals in a metro area of less than 100,000 people.
The shortest wait time, when I got there at 4 am and no one was around, was six hours. Which was when he gave up and went home in Canada.
My wife is an RN and I work in a hospital in a non-clinical logistical role that oversees throughput at multiple facilities. USA.
Right now for the past trending weeks with respiratory illnesses rising through the holidays given travel, family gatherings, shopping, etc. — our average length of stay has been 10+ hours. Unfortunately when we’re practically in a triage situation, it’s extremely difficult to see every single person in a timely manner — especially when vitals are stable.
All this recent talk has brought back up all the research I did around a decade ago on healthcare in America. The bottom-line is this:
- We spend upwards of 2x the amount of money per capita on healthcare than competing OECD nations.
- We achieve worse or at-best equal results (depending on your quality of insurance; most people believe their insurance is good when it isn’t).
- Somewhere around half of Americans forego seeking medical attention for fear of medical bills. Naturally this causes problems to snowball and, getting more complicated and costly to fix in the first place.
- The vast majority of bankruptcies in America is a result of medical debt; the majority of whom had health insurance at the onset of their illness.
At the end of the day, I’d still rather have Canada’s system than ours.
Oh yeah, I hear nursing shortages in the U.S. are crazy and I’m sure that was a big part of the long waits. I wouldn’t want to be a nurse in this age of entitled assholes. Especially not after the way they were treated during COVID. Just a thankless job. And that isn’t even about our capitalist system as much as just America being filled with people with an overinflated sense of entitlement.
But of course, capitalism just makes it all worse.
I was just talking about this with my wife again yesterday. I showed her the stats right now and the kind of patients the floors were receiving and she said, “no wonder people are burning out; it’s a miracle they get any nurses at all.” And yes it’s true, for the education rate, the benefits and pay are good… But you earn every single penny knee-deep in literal c-diff shit and violent grannies and people drugged out. We lost a lot of good nurses over the course of the pandemic and I can’t blame them. For all the yellow ribbons slapped on suburbans during the 2000s for soldiers, where were the ribbons for healthcare workers? Oh right, laypeople exemplifying Dunning-Kruger and embracing conspiracy theories on a topic they know nothing about while my wife was pushing body bags into the morgue. Anti-vaxx folks with plummeting O2 stats and they and their family suddenly begging for the vaccine now. Too late.
Literally all of our seasoned lead nurses on the ICU units turned over to find a specialty less on the front-line after those days. Again, I don’t blame them. They basically went to war and came back without any support like a Vietnam vet. Just in normal circumstances, the shit these medical workers see is really striking… And in some ways dare I say it might be worse than soldiering because at least with that, there’s some level of separation between normalcy and the battlefield. Whereas with nursing, it’s this constant shock of going to work for 12 hours and 100% adrenaline (especially things like a trauma ER, OR, or ICU) — then come back and jump right back into parenting. Then rinse, repeat. Naturally death isn’t exactly on the line for you; but you’re still responsible for the lives of others.
What drove my wife away from the floors was the constant recycling of the same patients and not seeing the problems get better. The root problems of these people reside elsewhere in society and hospitals end up being the catch-all for mental and physical illness kicked under the rug.
Yeah, the need for nurses is growing daily, fewer people are choosing the career and more are leaving because nursing earlier because of the stress and abuse. But another major reason for long waits is that a lot of the people in the ER are there utilizing it as a primary care provider because they don’t have insurance to be able to get day to day care or they don’t go to an urgent care office. So many people are in the ER for antibiotics, cuts, scrapes, minor burns and breaks that really don’t need to be seen in the ER, adding to the long waits for people who do need to be there.
I’m Canadian in a city of around 1.5m and recently spent nearly ten hours in the ER for possible appendicitis (it wasn’t luckily). I spent around 15 minutes of that actually talking to anybody.
The Conservative premier of Ontario and other Conservative premiers are desperately trying to underfund our healthcare to the point where we ask for a US style system. “Starve the beast”. It feels like it’s working though because at this point I don’t even really feel like we have any healthcare.
Im in the EU and the longest I’ve ever had to wait in an ER was four hours. That was because they were doing lab work on my blood though. They took the blood maybe ten mins after I arrived. I think the longest I’ve ever had to wait until seeing a doctor was maybe an hour.
You’d probably have to be gushing blood out of every orifice to have less than a four hour wait in an American ER at this point.
And if you need pain relief, good luck.
That is horrific, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to brag, just a perspective to contrast the ‘socialized healthcare bad’ narrative you often get. Fingers crossed that with the new scrutiny your healthcare is under these days, things will improve a little for you!
