Some emergency rooms are full because there is no place to send patients for further care. The emergency room is not supposed to be a place to spend a lot of ti

Some emergency rooms are full because there is no place to send patients for further care. The emergency room is not supposed to be a place to spend a lot of time, they just treat your immediate life-threatening problem and then send you either home or to a hospital bed. But when hospital beds and elderly care units are full, the patients stay in the emergency rooms. I suspect (but do not know for certain) that part of the reason is the big social and healthcare reform that is to take place in 2023. The responsibility for arranging healthcare lies on municipalities and is going to be transferred to new, euphemistically named "wellbeing services counties". This means that each municipality loses some funds from their budget, and the amount depends on their social-services and healthcare budgets for 2022. This means that keeping the budget artificially low this year means they have more money available for other purposes next year (schools, roads, libraries, what have you). Here's an article (in Finnish) from 2021 discussing this risk: https://www.iltalehti.fi/politiikka/a/21899c53-d959-4383-a759-25ceee30cc7c https://www.iltalehti.fi/politiikka/a/21899c53-d959-4383-a75...