Still waiting for medical care in Massachusetts
May 20th, 2009 | by Brian Schwartz |From the Boston Globe:
Despite Boston’s abundance of top-notch medical specialists, the waits to see dermatologists, obstetrician-gynecologists, and orthopedic surgeons for routine care have grown longer - to as much as a year for the busiest doctors.
…
Patients in Boston and other areas of Massachusetts for years have faced notoriously long delays, according to earlier surveys of physicians’ offices. A number of factors contribute, doctors said, but the 2006 health insurance law, which has required hundreds of thousands of state residents to obtain coverage, probably has worsened the waits. …
But the [survey] authors also pointed to the more than 400,000 newly insured residents flooding doctors’ offices, and said the long waits in Boston “may signal what could happen nationally in the event that access to healthcare is expanded through healthcare reform.”
(Via FIRM. See also this article on Massachusetts by Paul Hsieh.)
tags: coverage is not care, Massachusetts health
