Inside America’s emergency room crisis

What’s going on in the ER? Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are all near the top of the list for hours patients spend waiting for their name to be called. 

One of the reasons for the bottleneck is that American hospitals have a “boarding” problem. Patients who come into the ER and need inpatient care often spend hours, sometimes days, on a stretcher waiting for a hospital bed to open up. 

And there is no bandaid solution to the overcrowding. According to researchers, the financial structure of hospitals is a little bit like airlines – overbooking is essential to maximizing profits. Add onto that a backlog of care needs shirked during COVID, healthcare worker burnout, rising insurance costs, and an aging population — and suddenly you have a crisis looming. 

If something doesn’t change, researchers project that the US could face a critical hospital bed shortage by 2032. So how can we get more urgency in the emergency department? And what’s at stake if we don’t? On this edition of Studio 2, we’re getting an insider’s view of the ER. 

Guests: 

• Dr. Austin Kilaru, MD, emergency physician and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Penn’s Perelman School.
• Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, former senior writer at The New York Times, and author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.” Before transitioning to journalism, she was an ER doctor in New York City.