Amazing what people can read from a comment. Notice that I said ER has long ceased to be useful and not that ERs are useless. May be the subtlety in the differe

Amazing what people can read from a comment. Notice that I said ER has long ceased to be useful and not that ERs are useless. May be the subtlety in the difference is only in my state of mind as I wrote the comment. But, what I meant to say was that for a vast number of genuine ER cases that come in, even with triage prioritization, the care is delivered later than it should because of the number of non emergency cases clogging up the system. Most people I saw in the ER the other day had non acute symptoms, (while I cannot really say anything without knowing their medical history, the fact that most people were munching on takeouts or vending machine food and seemed to have been there for hours tells me the symptoms are probably not acute. Their circumstances may be such that ER is the only place they can go to, but that is a different problem.