From someone who works in a hospital emergency room…
The reason there's a 4-5 hour wait in our emergency room is simple. There's a 4-5 hour wait everywhere. People know they have nowhere else to go where there won't be a 4-5 hour wait so they sit there and put up with it. They have no choice. If there was a hospital down the street that got people in and out right away, we'd lose a lot of business and the management of the hospital where I work would make changes.
It often breaks my heart to see people sitting there hour after hour, moaning in pain and crying. I am proud of how many people we help but frustrated that we cannot do better for them. We could if we had more room and more facilities and more staff. More doctors would also help but I think we could cut the wait times in half with the same number of doctors if we had more examining rooms and nurses. Unfortunately then, there might be occasional hours when we weren't working to capacity (wouldn't that be nice?) and someone would say "Why did we build all these extra examining rooms and hire these extra people if they're not in use?"
People ask me what they can do to deal with the long wait times. I tell them the only thing is to only get sick when you know you can get an appointment with your physician. I wish I had a better answer.
It has been my experience — and I think I've said this before here — that the doctors and nurses I've encountered in hospitals have been generally wonderful. There have been exceptions but not many. My problems have all come from the overall bureaucracy and the paper shufflers and the setup, which includes crippling financial burdens. Within a very inefficient framework, dedicated medical professionals perform well. But that framework and the sheer cost of health care are killing a lot of people…and I use the word "killing" in its literal definition.