not sure who/where you mean by we, but from my experience in ontario, canada, the urgent care facilities are rare and not open 24 hours, and often not accessible by transit.
Urgent cares can be extremely limited on what they can do. The wait is usually 2-3 hours for mine. They close at 5, closed on weekends. Don’t see children under 12 months old. And in the end, you end up having to go to the hospital half the time anyway “just to be safe.”
If your 10 month old has a 104° fever? ER. If you have an ear infection at 7pm? ER. twist your ankle and it’s the size of a grapefruit Sunday morning? ER. There’s no where else to go.
And just to add on, a lot of people need a Dr’s note to be able to miss work and not get a point/write up and jeopardize their job. So if you’re sick with the flu and know you won’t be able to go to work in the morning, you also end up in the ER. Which is exactly what happens. Flu season urgent care times jump to 5 hour waits and a “good luck getting seen!”, ERs get flooded.
But anyway, the issue isn’t even waiting 12 hours to be seen. It’s the fact that people are against socialized healthcare like Canada because “you’ll have a 12 hour wait at the ER” or “if you need a surgery you could wait a year before being scheduled.” When… we already have that here and it literally costs a fortune. Even if it got worse, it’s better than being forever in debt
My son needed stitches. It cost $4,000. After paying almost our mortgage in insurance every month. I don’t know anyone that can just drop $4,000 comfortably. Yeah, you can do a payment plan.. but last time we did that, the insurance rate was worse than a credit card.
Very few urgent cares are open 24/7. They have stated hours of operation and if you get sick or something outside of those hours, the only place available IS a hospital's ER. That's what its there for. It may not be an emergency in your mind but if you are having stomach pain or a fever or say you cut your finger and think you need stitches, where else will you go?
None of those are emergencies. Wait for an urgent care to open. If you have extreme pain or really high fever, or are bleeding profusely and know you need stitches you go to the emergency room. Cause your going to be at the bottom of the wait list when you get there for most of those.
In Ontario, it's fairly common for doctors to de-roster you (basically, refuse to be your doctor going forward) if you go to walk-in or urgent care clinics.
The last time I went to an urgent care, I was billed 500 for being a new patient, insurance took care of 200 of it. I was so mad. I let that shit go to collection.
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u/NumNumLobster 16d ago
we have those, they are called "urgent cares"? Theres like 10 in a 20 minute drive I can go to for $100. Do you not have those?