The nuns in flowing robes and smiling nurses have been replaced. In their place is the emergency admitting, computer workstation operator who will check your documentation, get your numbers, make sure of payments, and ask why you came. After these admitting formalities are completed, they put you into short-term storage in the waiting area, or the observation corridor. Waiting in the emergency department certainly helps you to understand that the hospital of today is first of all a business, with bureaucratic structure, that, in concert with government, decides how healing is to be metered out to meet political ends, with political-correctness in the hospitals. The sad part is that we pay for it, not only with our funding and inconvenience, but with our lives.
Hospitals are for healing.
We go there when the family, or our personal physician, can no longer provide for our medical needs at home. When this situation arises, we are in a vulnerable situation. Yet increasingly over the years, their healing activities have been undermined. Several hospitals no longer deliver babies because they were reluctant to end life as well. The present delivery room reality is that the physician and nurse delivering your child or grandchild may have just terminated the life of one on the same ward.