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| Re: GOP Senators Reveal Health Bill (1443927) | |||
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Re: GOP Senators Reveal Health Bill |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Jun 23 23:01:11 2017, in response to Re: GOP Senators Reveal Health Bill, posted by bingbong on Thu Jun 22 22:04:41 2017. I googled the percent rural population for both the US and Canada. It's a statistical tie at slightly under 20%.The real question is how did the report define wait time. It was the interval between after the patient was referred by his/her primary care physician to when that patient actually received care from a specialist. It did not mention the wait time to see a primary care physician. Canada has a relative scarcity of specialists, whereas the US has a relative scarcity of primary car physicians. I think wait time to see a primary care physician is a more important indicator. One reason for lower US life expectancy and higher cost per patient is that simple conditions are ignored until they become major. The reluctance to see a primary care physician may be due to cost or primary care physician scarcity in the US. Another problem with the wait time measure in the Canadian study is that while procedures might be medically necessary, they may not be immediately necessary. The primary care physician and the specialist are better judges of what's immediately necessary than the patient or the statistician. If the primary care physician and the specialist were not correct in assessing what's what's medically necessary vs. what's immediately necessary, then Canadian life expectancy would not be higher than the US. |
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