Of course, they’re just greedy bastards. It’s not like there were too few doctors for too many patients.

Every minute you’re waiting your doctor is caring for someone else.

Growing up with a sibling who needed some pretty serious surgeries early on (and then needing some myself as a teen), I spent a lot of time as a kid in doctor's offices. I learned very quickly that going to a doctor's office and waiting is a good thing, because it means you are not the most urgent problem the doctor has to attend to. Someone else could be currently getting their cancer diagnosis explained to them, or the odds of making it alive through surgery, or any other dire shit people hear in doctor's offices. Just because you're there for antibiotics for a sinus infection it doesn't mean everyone is.

Like yeah, it's annoying to wait. You literally have the internet in your pocket though, you can entertain yourself. If you keep getting rushed out of appointments because you have too much to discuss you need to tell the front desk when you call that you need to be scheduled for a longer appointment. If your schedule allows it always do early morning appointments, they have shorter wait times because you're not dealing with 15 other people with appointments before you all being 5 minutes late and fucking up the schedule.

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My favorite is sitting there while my doctor of 5 years goes through my e-chart on her computer trying to remember who the fuck I am and what exactly is wrong with me.

At least she doesn't google anything while I'm there.

I work in a clinic with many surgeons. Luckily they don't typically double/triple book, but it's not unheard of. Most of the time that they're late, it's because they were seeing a patient from before who was late, or they got called into emergency surgery which throws the whole outpatient schedule off.

One or two of the doctors just seem like slower workers, that happens too.

I'm sure there are some offices that do that, but the answer is likely much simpler. People lie. And they lie to staff a lot.

It's not that they're triple booking, it's that everyone schedules an appointment but doesn't say what they're actually needing the Doctor for. So the staff schedule according to what a patient says they are there for, which should take say 15 minutes for what the patient says they need, but after the patient is actually there, they tell the Doctor about 3 other things they never mentioned to the staff ahead. This is what takes up more time than scheduled. Then there's the people that are late at the beginning of the day. First appointment of the day at 8am but they show up at 8:15 for a half'-hour appointment, and the Doctor still sees them, because their next appointment for 8:30 obviously isn't there yet, but that appointment now also goes long.

This then compounds through the day, helped only by pre-planned empty sections of the schedule normally for emergency appointments, people cancelling or not showing up, and people that actually are there for what they said they are getting in and out and taking up less time than planned.

This sometimes happens with public healthcare where I live. I think it's more about there being too few doctors rather than profits, at least in our case.

They will totally turn you away. Because of traffic I was 10 minutes late to my general practitioners office a few months ago and they refused to see me. I was pissed.

I wish that were true. It isn't. My doc routinely sets me up as his first or second patient of the day and he's always late. Docs seem to like blaming patients for their own faults.

you'd think they'd leave some gaps between their appointments to compensate for this phenomenon?

Try 2h and 21 min. I left

This is one of my favorite pictures on the internet.

You probably just put them back on schedule for the day so they were happy you got them out on time lol