Fun in the emergency room

I have to admit that I have become really, really bored with the ongoing discussion on health care reform. I have been listening to the same arguments and the same lies for most of my life (and it has so far been a long one). Some things I know for certain. It is broken. It has been broken for years. We need to fix it. Last night I spent several hours in the emergency room with a friend. I discovered one aspect of our current system that is expensive and unnecessary. People use the emergency room as a primary care facility. In the entire three hours I was there, I saw only one real emergency. A young man had crashed his motorcycle and hit his head. He needed the emergency room. Emergency rooms are expensive. It would be much more cost effective if we provided inexpensive primary care for everyone and saved the expensive emergency room facilities for real emergencies. It's about time that we realized the value of good preventive and primary care or everyone.