ERs are HUGE money-losers for hospitals. Coupled with an overcrowding problem, it’s a real issue.

From the article, which you obviously didn’t read:

“In recent years, emergency rooms at local public and private hospitals regularly have gone on “drive-by status,” requiring ambulances to divert seriously ill or injured patents to other facilities.

Drive-by status has become frequent, in part, because so many patients with nonurgent symptoms seek care at emergency rooms, concluded Save Our ERs in a report two years ago. Save Our ERs was a coalition of regional leaders in medicine, business and government that advocated changing local health care policy to help alleviate emergency room overcrowding.

Last year, Ben Taub’s emergency room was on drive-by status 42 percent of the time and LBJ’s, 55 percent.”

Emphasis mine.

A huge contributor to the problem is this:

“More than half of the 166,000 people who went to LBJ and Ben Taub emergency rooms last year could have received appropriate treatment elsewhere, said James Hearn, assistant administrator at LBJ, who is leading the effort to divert nonurgent patients from emergency rooms.

“Accessing the emergency room for the sniffles is not appropriate. We will be teaching people to navigate our system and use our clinics,” Hearn said.

He said patients come to emergency rooms for sore throats and minor stomachaches, and some bring children for immunization shots.”

Those are not appropriate uses for the emergency room.