My mother is home now and doing better but I spent all of last evening in a hospital emergency room with her, appalled as I usually am about what you have to do to get medical care in this world. We got there before 8 PM and though we made it clear my mother was in great pain (a wound on her foot), we still didn't see a doctor until after Midnight — and that was only because I started in with threats to call this or that hospital official. A nurse told me that four hour waits are not at all unusual. In fact, they're pretty much the norm these days everywhere.
We don't wait four hours for any other business. We don't have to because when other kinds of businesses have people waiting, they expand and build new facilities and train more employees to meet the demand. Obviously, it's not as easy to build a hospital as it is to erect a new Starbucks, and it takes a lot less time to train the employees in the latter. But we have pretty accurate projections of the population in the future and a pretty fair idea of what percentage will need medical treatment. Why have hospitals, at least in terms of facilities, fallen so far behind the expected demand? In the emergency room I was in last night, it was Standing Room Only, even though some of the people there were there because they couldn't stand…and there isn't even an epidemic or natural disaster sending excess patients to the E.R. This is business as usual. A doctor shortage, I can almost understand. What I don't get is why they don't even have enough chairs in the waiting room.
I'll write more about this when I wake up. Right now, I just wanted to vent that much and apologize that posting may be light here the next few days. I was behind already and now this had to happen. Good night.