Guaranteed Healthcare

In the last 4 years I have taken three different people to the emergency room. These visits (5 in all) involved 3 different hospitals, including Johns Hopkins and 2 suburban hospitals. Each visit lasted an average of 15 hours. In all but one case, the person I took needed to be admitted. All had insurance. The reason the visits were so long, in each case, was that the emergency rooms were filled with people who needed to be admitted, but the hospital had no free beds. In one case we waited 7 hours before ever seeing a doctor.

People were lined up on gurneys in the hall. Our problems go beyond the fact that so many are uninsured. Even if you have insurance, as all the people involved did, hospitals are functioning on the ragged edge. If we ever do have a pandemic or a terrorist attack it is clear to me that our medical system is too over-stretched to function. As long as we have a for-profit system, our priorities will be skewed towards selling products and services and away from creating a safe healthy community.