Universal Healthcare Doesn't Mean Waiting Longer to See a Doctor

[laundry_queen]

4. I'm in Canada

and I'd just like to point out how long you wait varies wildly by region. When I lived in remote areas up north, we often did have to wait quite a while for a doctor's appointment - which is what happens when there are only 2 full time doctors in town, and they also run the ER at the hospital. The usual response from the receptionist at the clinic when you would say, "I don't want to wait until Friday, can't you find something sooner?" was "He's on shift right now at the ER, if you really want to see him, you can go there now and catch him."
That was a function of the difficulty in recruiting doctors that wanted to work in remote, freezing cold, areas. Those 2 doctors had to function in many capacities and were quite overworked (but they were very, very wealthy). Now that I'm in the 'burbs of a big city, I almost always get a same or next day appointment, and if I can't (like recently when my clinic suddenly found themselves short 2 doctors due to illness) there are a bunch of 24 hour walk-in mediclinics I can chose to go to.

So the Canadian average likely factors in a lot of areas that have problems recruiting doctors. And yeah, there's often a wait for specialists too. Typical wait I've found to be same as yours, although we've had a few times where it was less than 2 weeks. That's just because there's a shortage of specialists, not because of some function of the single payer system.