The Associated Press recently ran a story - picked up by a local Northern Panhandle newspaper today - about how hospitals are trying to reduce the length of time patients spend in emergency room waiting rooms. It described how a woman named Beatrice Vance died of a heart attack in a Chicago-area hospital's ER waiting room after going over two hours without being examined by a physician. The story also described how patients commonly have to wait for several hours for non-emergency procedures and for routine examinations for which they supposedly had appointments.
Apparently, the majority of voters in Western Pennsylvania's Fourth Congressional District think that's not such a bad thing. They voted out Rep. Melissa Hart and replaced her with Jason Altmire, one of the worker bees on Hillary Clinton's ill-conceived health care task force. You remember HillaryCare, the government-run health care system that would have brought criminal charges against patients for going outside their arbitrarily prescribed regions for treatment, and against doctors for daring to provide healthcare beyond that decreed by a faraway bureaucrat.
Clearly, affordable health care is to be desired for all Americans, but do we really want our emergency room waiting areas to look like the Social Security office, another paragon of efficiency? Do we want to entrust our lives and those of our children to a bored government worker in another state? How well has the government, federal or state, ever run anything?
Take a number, and try not to die.
