I saw a women nearly give birth un a US hospital waiting room once - people were screaming "she's having a baby right now!" while a robot like receptionist just kept saying "please return to the line" over and over. I was only 16, so this was decades ago but I'll never forget dropping to the floor to get ready to catch that baby if I had too. Thankfully someone finally came in with a gurney and I suspect that baby was born moments later.
That was in a huge urban "charity" hospital, but of course most of those are gone now. This isn't about socialized medicine which in my personal experience tends to do better for most people than the US ration system via insurance policy and poverty medical cards (which many working people don't have). It is about disorganized hospitals with people forced to keep putting out so many fires at once that the just can't cope with something that refuses to play by the admission rules of the ER and babies are like that. Look for this sort of thing in the US as more ER's close and more funding for staff is cut. For profit medicine is just as likely if not more likely to cut expenses down below a real working number of staff (outside of affluent and well run private hospitals for the well healed and well insured); they do it for different reasons and ration the care differently than the NHS or Swedish Health service, but it still happens every day.
expatriate Californian living in rural Ireland with husband, dogs, horses. garden and many, many cats
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