More recent hospital records from St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center on Manhattan’s West Side, for example, show that there were 105,000 visits to the emergency room last year, up from 59,000 in 1999. “I can’t foresee how we can keep up that pace,” said Dr. Dan E. Wiener, chairman of the hospital’s department of emergency medicine. “The overcrowding is just there — it’s the background noise of life. Some days things are O.K., it’s tolerable. Some days it’s over the top.”
Many New York hospitals are also contending with yet another new influx of patients who normally would have sought care at nearby hospitals that have closed, merged with other hospitals or will soon close. A state commission in 2006 ordered almost two dozen mergers or closings in an effort to shrink the state’s enormous hospital industry, because beds at some of them were going unused.
Other hospitals across the nation, sustaining big losses in their emergency rooms and depleting their charity care funding for the uninsured, have shut down their emergency rooms or even closed completely.
I'm surprised emergency rooms continue to exist. They don't seem profitable at all... and isn't that the benchmark for everything these days? I'm surprised they're not all replaced with botox centers.
