I got my gallbladder out recently. This came as a bit of a surprise, as it started with a day of what I (incorrectly) assumed was norovirus back in February, and ended with surgery at the beginning of June. All together it was about a 3.5 month process: about a week before I decided to go see my doctor, a week before I could get all the testing to rule out other things, 7 weeks for a surgical consult, a few days to coordinate the surgical date and then about 5 weeks to surgery. I was feeling pretty miserable by the end there, but I was able to squeeze an eye surgery in to the wait time so it wasn’t all wasted.
Since I had some time to ponder what I was doing, I decided to peruse Reddit to see what other people in my situation had done. For those of you who haven’t been on Reddit for various health conditions, it can be an experience. There a lot of useful information, some really not useful information, and some unexpected information. One of the more interesting things I’ve found over the years is that because most subreddits are in English, they can give you a really good sense about how medical care for specific conditions differs between English speaking countries. We are constantly told that the US healthcare system is broken, and maybe it is. But I think there’s some really interesting information when you stop looking at healthcare in general and switch to looking at a specific condition, so you can see how you in particular would do under the Canadian or British healthcare systems vs the US.
For gallbladders, I quickly discovered the wait times in the NHS are over a year once you’ve been recommended for surgery, and in some places they won’t even put you on the list until your liver or pancreas start to go. The wait times got so bad post COVID that they published a paper on how to help clear the queue, which started at around 452 day wait time. It got so bad the general recommendation was to pay an extra $7,000 out of pocket to get it done privately. Someone who had almost my exact surgery date had been waiting over a year and then got theirs cancelled randomly with no reschedule. I can say I would not have been able to keep working if I had to wait over a year, and I was considered a mild case. It reminds me of the iron triangle: you can have something that’s good, fast or cheap, but you can’t have all three.
This is not the first time I’ve discovered I would have been substantively worse off in the UK. Back in 2020 my migraines were wildly out of control, and my doctor suggested a newly approved medication called Nurtec. This worked wonderfully for me, and still does. I found out recently it took almost 4 extra years to be approved in the UK for treatment of acute migraines. People were paying privately for years (at about $100 a pill) because it was working so well for others around the world, but was completely unavailable through the NHS. Finally, I’m in a Facebook group for those with my eye condition, and they routinely say it takes a year+ to get a cornea specialist appointment in England. I got mine in 3 weeks.
I will not draw grand conclusions from solely my own experience, but it is notable to me that of my three major health problems, all would have required me to spend a lot of money on private care if I wanted the level of service I got here in the US. If you also have health conditions and are dealing with health insurance, it’s a fun exercise to see how that would go in other countries. I recommend it as a data gathering exercise.
Happy 4th everyone!
graph paper diaries 
About 8 years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. There are three treatments recognized as effective. Trying to decide among the three, I looked up the survival rates for each. It turned out to be about 95% (at the time) for each. But in my research, I ran across a corresponding figure for the survival rate in the UK: 80%. That doesn’t sound too different, until you turn it around – you were four times more likely to die in the UK than in the US. By the way, my doctor scoffed, and said, “Well, for ME, it’s 98%.”
This brings up one of my pet peeves: people who use life expectancy as a measure of the effectiveness of health care, and use that number to say that health care in the US is “broken.” Life expectancy is only a proxy for health care, and a lousy one, at that, because it depends on so many other things. Also, other countries calculate it differently. And you cannot believe a word that comes out of a place like Cuba, which is sometimes touted as having excellent health care. If you want to measure health care, it should be a direct measurement, not a proxy.
Hope you don’t mind if I link to this on Facebook.
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Feel free to link!
And yes, good point about healthcare and life expectancy. My general sense is the USs lower life expectancy is primarily due to gun deaths (including suicides), drugs and cars, all of which take out people in their prime and reduce life expectancy faster than later in life conditions, and none of which can be helped by the healthcare system. I may do a post about this.
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Also different life expectancy according to race. While some of that is likely due to higher incidence of obesity in African-Americans, some of it seems to be world wide, and thus not due to any nation’s health care system. Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK all have fewer African Americans. There are lots of wheels turning in that so it is hard to measure, but what seems to be a slight racial difference affects statistics on births and deaths.
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