I remember being tested for my first aid badge in the Boy Scouts in 1948 and asking my longtime family doctor, the examiner, why he was moving his magnificent burgundy red leather chairs out of his waiting room and replacing them with wooden benches. It still is. The demand for treatment for real and imagined disease virtually broke the bank. To reduce demand for night house calls for overworked primary care physicians, the government created a cutoff time in the evening and appealed to the public not to telephone after that time unless it was a true emergency. Lots of requests for instant house calls for nonemergencies came during the 15 minutes before cutoff time.
Patient demand remains insatiable.
Doctors in the front line see overuse as a problem, too. At my 35-year medical school reunion in 1993 I asked an old friend, one of Britain's GPs, why their waiting rooms were always full. They know there is such a thing as a free lunch. Health care here in Britain is a banquet, and every bugger in this country thinks he's starving. I'm surprised by those experts in the United States who don't seem to understand that if medical care has low or no copayments people will use the service more.