Some tips on how to “survive” an ER visit:

The main culprit isn’t incompetence but chaos: The nation’s emergency rooms are overburdened and underfunded, treating ever more patients with ever fewer resources. “You don’t want to scare the public, because hundreds of thousands of patients get cared for very well in emergency rooms every day,” says Gail Warden, president emeritus of Michigan’s Henry Ford Health System, who chaired a trio of studies of emergency care released in June by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine. “But the system is stretched, and it could be at a breaking point in three to five years.”

Federal law requires that ER doctors and nurses treat everyone who shows up, regardless of ability to pay, but there has never been enough federal money to cover those costs””and that money is dwindling.