In the US, that stuff more times than not happens within 2-3 weeks.

It's the same where I'm from. I'm from continental Europe and while we have universal health care (i.e. everyone has health insurance), it's not entirely free. We pay fairly small fees for medication and doctor's or hospital visits, and our health insurance pays back the fee in part (depending on the type of medication or specialist care you need). So you end up paying hardly anything for most medication (e.g. I paid about €1 for a box of antibiotics a few weeks ago, and a box of paracetamol or ibuprofen will cost you about €5).

I moved to the UK a while ago and while it's great that everything's free here, the wait times are so much longer than I've ever encountered in my native country. If I want to see a specialist, it can take anything from one week to maybe three at most. The only exception are gyneacologists, they usually have wait times of several months if you're just going for a routine check-up; even then, urgent cases are given priority and you can see a gyneacologist in a few days or a week at most. 18 weeks in the UK is ridiculously long.

I've also got the feeling that most GPs are only willing to do the bare minimum. They'll hardly ever do any extra tests that they don't consider to be entirely necessary, even if doing so would provide additional proof (or would perhaps disprove) their diagnosis. And most of the time, the doctor's just sat behind his or her desk, and offers a diagnosis without even touching me. One of them diagnosed my SO with food poisoning while in reality, he had an infection in one of his kidneys. Told him to wait until it passed, and that cost him a kidney. If that doctor had taken a proper look at him, they might have been able to save it.