Why My Korean Doctor's Appointment Lasts Three Minutes — Epoche B1
South Koreans visit a doctor more often than anyone else in the OECD, roughly three times the average number of visits a year, and the visit itself is famously about three minutes long. I used to think those two facts were a complaint and an insult, in that order. They are not. They are one fact, and it comes out of the way the system pays for care. Here is the machinery, put plainly. One national insurer covers everybody, and it sets the price of each item of care — a consultation, an injection, a test — and those prices are low. I can walk into any clinic near my flat without a referral from anyone. There is no family doctor who must first let me through the gate. The clinic is paid for each act it performs. Now follow the causes. Because the fee per visit is low, a clinic can only stay open by seeing many patients. Because I need no referral and pay little, I go whenever I am worried. Because the queue is long, my turn is short. So the three minutes are not laziness. They are the price of speed and access: I can see a specialist this morning, in a country where waiting months would be a scandal. But the money a hospital cannot earn on covered care comes back another way, as the things the insurer does not cover: the better room, the extra scan, the newer treatment. That is why so many households buy private top-up insurance on top of the national one. My mother has one. She calls it her real insurance, which is a strange sentence to say about a country with excellent public cover, and an honest one. References OECD (2023). Health at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing. National Health Insurance Service (2022). National Health Insurance System of Korea. National Health Insurance Service, Republic of Korea.