> the US provides access to specialists in days where other countries often have multi-week [...] This is a view that's strongly distorted by the UK. It's seem

> the US provides access to specialists in days where other countries often have multi-week [...] This is a view that's strongly distorted by the UK. It's seems to hold there, and the wait times sound terrible, but it's definitely not the case in the majority of countries, by a long shot. As far as I can tell from personal experience, wait times are not an issue in The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, or France; outside of that I've never heard of really long waits in any country of Europe, with the exception of the UK. The European systems are all different in sometimes surprising ways, throwing them together into one bucket is an incorrect generalization. E.g. the UK system with the NHS is entirely tax funded, where the Germany system has insurance paid 50/50 by employee and employer, and the Swiss system has 100% privately paid but mandatory and state regulated insurance. These are really massively different systems, and the effects on e.g. waiting times are huge. They are all state regulated and sometimes state funded, but that's by far not the only interesting characteristic of medical systems.