Sooner or later, you will need the ER. I don’t care how healthy you are, how much you hate going to the hospital for care, how much you distrust doctors or modern medicine, how rich you are, or how deep in the woods you live, the odds are almost 100 percent that in your lifetime you will end up in the ER.
You may get lucky, and find yourself in a hospital that is staffed by highly qualified emergency physicians, backed up by a full roster of highly trained specialists and a bevy of great nurses, technicians and the latest in diagnostic equipment and sophisticated operating rooms and ICUs and cardiac cath labs and all the rest. But don’t count on it. In fact, the odds are pretty good that in the very near future this is not what you will find. In fact, in many areas of the country, you may not be able to find this right now. Why is that?
Emergency departments and the folks who provide care in these facilities are generally devoted to meeting a mission, actually, several missions. Providing care to everyone, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay for this care is one such mission, perhaps the most important one.
Another is providing surge capacity (the ability to gear up and staff up to meet sudden, unexpected surges in demand) in response to disasters, multiple casualty incidents, terrorist attacks, epidemics and pandemics, and the every-day situation where serious illness or injury strikes lots of different individuals in a community in a very short time span.
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