Most Emergency Rooms are packed with patients and the waiting time for care is extraordinarily long. If you have a minor illness it could take hours to be seen. Doc in the Box or Urgent care Centers have given a little relief but the ERs are still packed. It’s mostly people who can’t get a doctors appointment or they are just afraid they may have something bad and want it checked out. When a patient has an acute illness they can’t wait weeks for a doctor’s appointment. There are a lot of uninsured folks seeking care because they have nowhere else to go and are not usually turned away from an Emergency Room.

I have noticed through the years that there are times when the ER is almost empty. You won’t find anyone there on Christmas morning unless they are truly sick. Another time is during the Super Bowl. All of America stops for that event, even the Emergency Rooms. A couple of hours after the game the place will again become packed. It would be interesting to plot the death rate in America hour by hour. I suspect it would drop during the Super Bowl. The world stops during the game so the number of accidents drop and iatrogenic deaths in the hospitals stop for that brief period of time.

Another way to clear the ER is to walk in with a uniform that has a US Border Patrol Patch. The illegal aliens will scramble for the door. The ER is the main source of medical care for illegal aliens. These folks are usually pretty sick and really stress the system that is already stressed to the breaking point.

One other word of caution about the ERs. If at all possible don’t go in the first couple of weeks in July because that’s when all the new interns and residents start and these are the ones who deliver most of the care. For that reason I think it would be best to have the Super Bowl on July 4th. A lot of lives would be saved. With the way it is now, I always stay on the porch on July 4th, surrounded by pillows, so I won’t run the risk of being taken to he ER.