You can’t legislate a waiting time! Laws act on people, not reality. What if it takes the doctors longer to work on the people in front of you? What if more urgent cases arrive and goes to the front of the line?
You can legislate it because it puts the government in breach of law if they don't provide sufficient funding to ensure sufficient excess capacity to meet the criteria. Governments legislate standards of care all the time.
Imagine this take on something like an enterprise SLA, that helps me reason about how at an individual level it feels nonsensical but at the parent level there are a bunch of upstream levers available to meet those SLAs.
