They might be living in the UK where most of the population has no private healthcare insurance and the nationalized GPs are frequently all overloaded like that.
Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait. If I heard someone say that they were required to wait that long for in-person doctor's visits, I'd wonder why they were still seeing that doctor and ask them polite questions to try to figure it out.
That's the case where I live, there's only a few surgeries I'm allowed to register at and they all have this problem. I think there is some manipulation of statistics the surgeries do to prevent more being created, and to hide the difficulty in getting an appointment. For example rather than having 6 month waiting list, they don't make appointments more than a few weeks in advance, so you just can't get an appointment and it looks like nobody waits more than a few weeks. I think while surgeries are allowed to do this we'll never understand the real capacity.
Man, it should NOT be permitted to play with the "waiting list" stats in the way you describe. I wish you had someone who gave a fuck about (and could do something about) the problem to report it to... that's just bullshit.
Is it not allowed ?