indicate that it's already gone drastically downhill with the incorporation of various digital or computer-based facilities. It's gotten so bad that I actually did a bit of research to try to figure out why it's become so hard to reach a real doctor – are there fewer doctors in the US than there used to be, say, 30 years ago? As it happens, no – there are more doctors per capital than ever.
When I was a kid, you could reach a human carer quickly and easily: pick up the phone and reach a nurse if not a doctor. You might have to leave a message, but you'd get a call back reasonably quickly, and if your question wasn't too complicated, you could sometimes even get an answer over the phone.
Now, I have to work my way through an automated system in order to reach a human at a third-party answering service that not only can't answer any questions but can't even make an appointment – they then call the doctor's office, and it may be one day-to-literally weeks before I get a call back from someone who still can't answer my question but can at least make an appointment. Then it turns out that the first appointment isn't available for about 4 months. If you need help before then, they suggest going to an emergency room.
The other way to try to reach a human carer is via the doctor's portal – an extremely inconvenient way to communicate, since you have to log in, and some portals are so poorly designed that in one case, it took me months to figure out the only way for me to consistently get logged in: it required a regular 20-minute process of log-in attempts, phone calls for verification codes, password-resetting, account re-creating, etc. And it seems that at least some doctors' offices never read the messages left in their portals; and/or if they do, it may take several days to actually receive an answer.
In another example, I tried to obtain a second opinion from a doctor I'd seen before for the same condition within the same year as my original consultation with them. I was told that, although their system was supposed to be coordinated with that of my primary doctor so as to enable the 2nd-opinion doc to access my intervening test results, the second-opinion doctor's office was for some reason unable to access those results – so I'd need to obtain digital copies of all of them (there were quite a few, many irrelevant) and upload them to the second-opinion doctor's portal. I dutifully did this – in some cases, I had to physically visit the testing facility and have them print a copy and then scan it at home – and uploaded them all, only to be told that the second-opinion doctor – whose office was far away and located in a city with very expensive lodging – refused to look at any of it or consult with me via zoom, and would provide a second opinion only if I travelled to their city, which was far away and would require me to spend two nights in an expensive hotel.
In another example, it was 4 months before I was allowed to see a surgeon who could fix an agonizingly painful and partially-debilitating condition (all of this despite the fact that I have the best insurance money can buy in my state!)
We need to require Congress to rely on the same health care options as are available to the "least" of us.
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