If we're dead we don't need it anymore.
As I understand it, you show up to an ER, if ER is to believed, in the states and you're waiting a minimum 9 hours before anyone will do anything.
Actually there was a couple episodes of Nurse Jackie, where Nurse Jackie got sick of thepenny pinching from the admistrator, jabbed his ass with a sedative, or he was sick and passed out, I man be thinking about Frank and Hawkeye from M*A*S*H* but everything was backed up becuase management refused to go over budget and hire temp nurses for the week... So Jackie did it any way once any one who should be in charge was passed out.
It might have been the final of the season and they fired her?
I wouldn't take what happens on a TV show as truth. It's intentional hyperbole.
ED waits depend on a multitude of factors. I've had 2 ED visits at a major urban medical center in the last 2 years. One was 6 hours: I wasn't bleeding or in imminent danger of death, and 3 major freeway accidents just happened to occur that afternoon. People getting choppered in take priority.
For the second--a broken bone in my foot--I was in, x-rayed, casted & out the door in 45 minutes. It took longer to fill my prescription at the drugstore than it did in the ER.
The biggest problem in US EDs is that so many people go for treatment that would better be taken care of in an MD's office--but they don't have insurance, so they go to the ED. Technically, under the law, we don't have to treat non-emergent conditions in the ER. But tossing them out on the street leads to PR nightmares because Americans believe they deserve what they want when they want it. Who cares if the hospital eats the visit?
An example of where the US system completely fails is this:
My SIL was born with a dislocated hip. She had what was state-of-the-art treatment in the 1970s--casts & later surgery. The hardware is breaking down, and a pin has dug a groove in the head of her femur. The cartilage is gone. Every step she takes grinds bone away. It's excruciating.
In Canada, she'd get a hip replacement.
But, since she's in the US, her insurance company has to authorize it. Because of the hardware in her pelvis, there are only 2 places in the country she can go for a hip replacement (doing it wrong could shatter her pelvis). Fortunately, one is 40 miles from her home.
But her insurance company won't authorize it. Why? Because she's only 42 years old & artificial hips don't last forever. They'd need to replace the artificial joint within her lifetime. So, she has to wait until she's 55 before they'll authorize it.
By that time, she'll be in a wheelchair & unable to work.
I really fail to see how it benefits the country to declare her permanently disabled & pay her SSI rather than treat her and let her go back to nursing patients...
