Stories from my friend Kurtis Keith of Manitoba:

I bruised some muscles in my back in a car accident not too long ago. Went to the hospital, and had to wait 7 and a half hours before I even got out of the first waiting room. Then waited another hour before the nurse came in to tell me the doctor would be around shortly. Half an hour later, a doctor comes in asks a few questions, touches this and that, then says that a xray specialist will grab me to get an xray. 45 minutes later, I get my xray and go back to the doctors room to wait another 15 to find out the xrays were negative, and it was just bruised muscles. So I spent about 10 hours in the hospital and had about 5 minutes with an actual doctor and 10 minutes getting an xray.

But some of the stories from the waiting room were pretty bad.

There was one very old man lying on some sort of stretcher thing, constantly moaning every 15 minutes or so, and the woman with him, likely his daughter, was constantly asking nurses to let them in, because he was in incredible amounts of pain. After about 2 hours of this, the man begin almost screaming uncontrollably, and finally they let him in to see a doctor after the daughter demanded they let him in.

Also an old couple who came in much later than I did, kept bickering. The old man every 10 minutes or so, kept asking his wife why they were in a hospital, and she would tell him it was because he passed out at home, and they drove here in an ambulance. The man would get upset and say he didn't pass out, or remember coming here in an ambulance, and he wanted to go home. And the wife would get annoyed and tell him that they can't leave until he sees a doctor and he would have to wait because it would still be awhile before they got in. This exact same conversation happened about 10 or so times, before the woman was so annoyed, she gave in to the husband, and they took a cab home without seeing a doctor.

 

Do we really want this here in the United States of America?