About the health insurance, I'm not sure. I think it depends on what kind you have. I have to pay $30 per appointment. And it really depends on the doctor as well for how soon you can see them. If they're really busy it will take longer to get in. I can usually get in the same week with my doctors.

With insurance it varies widely because as of right now, we're not making people pay for one large government-controlled health insurance via their taxes. So it depends on what company you buy your insurance from, what plan you get, how high your premiums are, etc.

I mean, you can't even say "health insurance" as a blanket statement. It's like saying, how much do your groceries cost? Where it depends on what store you go to, what food you buy...

I can get an appointment usually same day with most doctors. Realistically, the more patients they see, the more income they receive, so many try to maximize the number of people they see. Doctors here are small business owners, they're not running on a fixed salary out of taxes. They can charge as much or as little as they want, see as many or as few patients as they want. It depends on how they choose to run their practice.

Health insurance does muck with it a little bit because health insurance is a big game here. Basically when you go in with insurance, the doctors charges the insurance his fee. The insurance will then respond with the fee they've "decided" the service is "worth." Most of the companies seem to hover around the same median rate, so the doctors usually get about the same fee. But if an insurance company contracts at really low rates, some doctors simply don't accept those insurance plans at all. For example, some doctors have stopped accepting Medicaid and Medicare (our government health plans for seniors and lower income), because Medicaid typically only pays about 50-70 cents on the dollar compared to private insurance plans. Which means many doctors ultimate lose money seeing Medicaid patients.

The problem is that health "insurance" is a losing game. Insurance only works if you are pretty healthy and get sick once in a blue moon and have no chronic conditions. Ideally you would pay a small amount, rarely have to see the doctor, and if you did happen to get into a car accident or something you'd be covered. You have the safety of being covered in a disaster, and the insurance provider and all their employees are able to stay in business.

Health insurance providers go out of business if they try to "insure" chronically sick people, obviously. And the more sick people in the pool, the more healthy people have to pay just to be insured. I have been both insured and uninsured. With severe acne, once I got uninsured it was really hard to get re-insured. With acne that was nigh untreatable, I was basically blowing through thousands of dollars seeing doctors and trying new treatments. Understandably, other people without those problems don't want to pay $1000 a month for their health insurance just so someone they don't know can try yet another acne treatment.

It's often easier to understand with car insurance. For example, I am an extremely safe driver. I have never had a ticket or accident. However, my car insurance rates are SKY HIGH! I live in an area where there are many unsafe drivers and uninsured drivers. Because there are so many accidents in my area and so many unsafe drivers in my "pool", my insurance company is regularly paying for hundreds of accidents a day. Even though I am a safe driver, the insurance rate is ultimately determined by the AVERAGE of the pool, not by my individual rating. It's the "one bad apple destroys the whole barrel" idea. When total costs go up, everyone's costs go up.

Another way to think of it is the heater in your house. I once had a roommate who was always cold in the wintertime and always hot in the summertime. She'd run the AC and heater constantly. Our apartment's utility bill quadrupled. I wasn't personally using the AC or the heat, but it didn't matter. As part of the apartment group, I was obligated to pay for one obnoxious roommate who wouldn't put on a sweater.

Basically, the thing to remember is that more sick people + more doctor visits + more treatment = more money + longer wait times. There is no mathematical way to "insure" EVERYBODY including chronically sick people and people on welfare and non-citizens who don't pay taxes, and expect taxes to stay the same and wait times to remain the same. It's really simple economics.