When thinking about healthcare it is very difficult to understand the sheer weight that is currently on the medical industry both in terms of volume of patients and the many patients that do not have health care or any kind of medical resource.
You can see it just about anywhere you would like to look and the biggest problem is that so many people are in need and the system is not setup to handle patients that need preventative care.
Emergency rooms have become the fall back position for many patients that just have no other resource and the sad fact is that most emergency rooms are turning away patients with limited care as evidenced by the recent Ebola outbreak where an emergency room failed to provide medical care to a man they might have saved.
The main issue was that affected the Ebola ER visit was the lax standard of care that these facilities tend to gravitate toward, which is a lack of treatment and they only provide minimal care, often with zero diagnostic testing.
This is what created the huge financial burden that the hospital in Texas sustained simply due to a failure to provide medical attention when it was needed.
I have witnessed this lax standard of care first hand, in the lack of medical care and treatment, which requires diagnostic care to prevent long term sustained medical expenses which could be prevented if only they did not turn patients away when that patient has no medical insurance or other resources to pay for the medical care.
This has long been the standard of care and it has only gotten worse.