Time spent with healthcare professionals does not account for time spent being impaired and adapting to those impairments. That's 3 weeks a year doing health care AND your entire year spent using a walker to get around your house.

There's also a distribution here, there's a fair amount of seniors with fairly minimal health problems at any given time, and some who are in more dire straits. You hear more from the people in dire straits.

So last month, I spent probably 1-2 hours on a medication issue. But if you were talking to me last month, you would have the impression that I was working on it for a full week. I needed to coordinate with the pharmacist, and then the doctor, and then another 3 pharmacies because < ... long and redacted rant about the DEA, pharmaceutical law, the cowards at the FDA, the cowards at modern big pharmacy corporations, and the lack of actual initiative and care provided by pharmacies ... >, then the doctor again, then the pharmacy again and then finally after all of that, I had to actually go and pick up my medication.

Each one of those steps might have only been 5-10 minutes out of my day at the time, but each of those steps played out over the course of a week. Additionally, each one of those steps doesn't account for having to block out that time of my day during a time when I would be most likely to reach the people I needed to without sitting on hold for an hour. It doesn't reflect the time I spent worrying about actually being able to get the medication I needed at all. It doesn't reflect the time I spent angry and frustrated at everyone involved in the process. And it doesn't reflect just how much of an energy suck the entire thing was in the first place. Nor the depression that comes from knowing I'm about to do it all over again next week. Or the fact that the month after that, I'll probably be doing it again and dealing with the insurance company on top of it. All of it looms over me like a storm cloud you can see coming for miles.

I also spent another ~30 hours on an unrelated medical thing, but that's only the time I spent actually doing it. Not the hour+ travel time every day, the extra hours put in at the office to make up for the lost time, the changes to routines and rescheduling of other items around it and so on and so forth.

Your health is the baseline from which everything else in your life is derived. Take care of it, because when it's gone, it takes so much more from you than just the time you spend at the doctor's office.

Because on a low level they are. 3 weeks = ~504 hours, averaged across a year that's ~1 hour and change, every day, dealing with health issues.

I’m not sure why you are being downvoted.

Maybe something like 40% of all value in America is in “feeling seen and heard.” Everything helps outcomes, but feelings aren’t the highest on the list of things that help outcomes, and it’s one of the most expensive to provide, and it’s behind the proliferation of sub clinical admin and midlevel staff, but it’s also what people want.

Because you haven’t considered the issue with sufficient knowledge of it to understand.