You haven’t been feeling well lately. You’re more tired than usual, a bit sluggish. You wonder if there’s something wrong with your diet. Or maybe you’re anemic? You call your primary-care doctor’s office to schedule an appointment. They inform you the next available appointment is in three weeks.
So, you wait.
And then you wait some more.
And then, when you arrive on the day of your appointment, you wait even more.
You fill out the mountain of required paperwork, but the doctor still isn’t ready to see you. You flip through a magazine for a while, then scroll through your phone until you’re finally called. You wait a little longer in a scratchy paper gown, then talk to your physician—if you can call it talking, since she’s mostly staring at a computer screen—for all of 10 minutes before you’re back out in the lobby with a lab order to have your blood tested.
Then you call to set up your blood test, and the waiting process starts over.
A few weeks after you get your results, a bill arrives in the mail. You’re charged hundreds of dollars for the blood work. The appointment was over in minutes,
