That's not quite correct. Hospitals can't turn away patients with life-threatening conditions until they are stable. In practice that means everyone gets triage

That's not quite correct. Hospitals can't turn away patients with life-threatening conditions until they are stable. In practice that means everyone gets triaged. A better system would run public clinics, staffed by PAs and nurse practitioners (with possibly a physician) near the ER, and force the people who have had a cough for two weeks to go to the clinic first. Work everyone near the top of their training, and give hospitals safe harbor for sending non-emergency patients to the clinic first. That's just one sensible (I think) proposal. We don't need to refinance the current system, we need to completely reengineer it.