By Nick Jacobs

If you discuss the current Emergency Room situation in the United States with anyone in the business responsible for keeping the doors open, you most likely will be given some very distressing information. The numbers of patients have been growing exponentially as other avenues previously used for care are no longer available. The reimbursement for UrgiCare centers reached such low levels that most of the quasi-emergency rooms were closed down or discontinued in many regions of our country.

As the graying of America continues, we see less and less emergency room physicians available to work and more and more who are attracted to the very lucrative world of locum tenem care where you spend a day or a week or a month doctoring somewhere and move on to your next assignment.

An article featured in MSN Money on March 1, 2007 entitled "10 Things Your Hospital Won't Tell You," quotes a new study from the Institute of Medicine that found that "hospital emergency departments are overburdened, under funded and ill-prepared to handle disasters as the number of people turning to ER's for primary care keeps rising."

It goes on to say that "an ambulance is turned away from an ER once every minute due to overcrowding, and the situation is further exacerbated by shortages in many of the 'on call' backup services for cardiologists, orthopedists and neurosurgeons." According to the article "things are getting worse." Finally, it says that "73% of ER directors report inadequate coverage by on-call specialists, versus 67% in 2004, according to a survey conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians."

The advice that the article spells out for the potential patient is that "if you can avoid the ER between 3 p.m. and 1 a.m., the busiest shift, and go there between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. your chances of a shorter wait is your best bet."

What the article doesn't say is what exactly are we going to do about this situation? How are we going to address the health care crisis in this country, and when will we finally acknowledge publicly that this country "Has no health care policy." As the gap between the very rich and the middle class widens, we are faced with the fact that more and more people will be falling through the net.