In 2007, the Commonwealth Fund released a report that compared U.S. health care against several other countries based on a variety of benchmarks. The data were principally derived from statistically random surveys of adult residents and primary care physicians from 2004 to 2006, in the following countries: United States, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. This is what the researchers found:
* Canada had the highest percentage of patients (36%) who had to wait six days or more for an appointment with a doctor, but the United States had the second highest percentage (23%) who reported that they had to wait at least this long. New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and the U.K. all had substantially smaller numbers of people reporting waits of 6 days or longer. Canada and the United States, in that order, also had the lowest percentage of persons who said they could get an appointment with a doctor the same or next day.
* The United States had the largest percentage of persons (61%) who said that getting care on nights, weekends, or holidays, without going to the emergency room, was “very” or “somewhat” difficult. In Canada, it was 54%, and in the U.K, 38%. Germany did the best, with only 22% saying that it was difficult to get after-hours care.
* The United States, though, scored well on physicians’ perceptions of how many patients experience long waits for diagnostic tests. 57% of physicians in the U.K, and 51% of Canadian physicians reported that their patients experienced long waits for diagnostic tests, compared to only 9% of U.S. physicians who reported the same.
* The U.K (60%) and Canada (57%) had the highest numbers of persons who had to wait four weeks or more to get to see a specialist physician. In the U.S., only 23% reported a wait of four weeks or more for specialty care.
* The U.S. also did very well on measures of wait times for non-emergency or elective surgery. Only 8% of surveyed patients in the United States reported a wait time of four months or more for elective surgery, compared to 33% in Canada and 41% in the U.K. Germany scored the best, with only 6% reporting a long wait for elective surgery.
The take-away message is that both the United States and Canada do pretty poorly, compared to most other industrialized countries, on how long patients have to wait to get a regular appointment with a primary care physician or after-hours care, but the U.S. does better than most on having shorter wait times for diagnostic procedures, elective surgery, and specialty care. Each of these countries, though, with the exception of the United States, has universal health insurance coverage, funded and regulated in large part by the government, so it doesn’t seem likely that government-subsidized health care, in itself, is the sole factor in determining how long patients are stuck in The Waiting Place. Other factors, like the numbers of primary care physicians and specialists in each country, may be more important.
