No Waiting Zone?

I live in the City of Flagler Beach on the east coast of Florida between the cities of Daytona Beach and St Augustine. When we moved into the area 20 yrs ago, there was one traffic light and one exit off I95 in the county .

It was great. My son said, we were in a 50's time warp and I thought that summed it up neatly. Things around here changed slowly until a couple of years ago when Palm Coast , basically just large real estate development north of here, owned and tightly controlled by ITT , was incorporated as a city.

After that there was explosive development, but no Plan B, so now we're left with thousands of mostly unsold dwelling units and dozens of strip malls and the full panoply of mostly empty big box stores, fast food emporia, 14 screen theater, fancy medical and office complexes and a palatial new hospital (less than half of which can be seen in the photo).

This is a very long segue into a first person account of the kind health care we paying customers enjoy now before KennedyKare is even upon us.

My husband had a scare at about 2 PM yesterday afternoon and not one of his highly paid private physicians was available to take his call. The best we were able to do is speak to the girl who answered the phone at one of his doctors' offices, who asked the nurse, who didn't come to the phone herself, but advised her to tell him to call 911.

As we were already in the car, we just drove ourselves over to the hospital where we idled away several hours in the ER which is being hyped and touted in newspapers and newsletters, on radio and TV and even on billboards along I95 as being a no waiting zone.

When we arrived there were three other people in the waiting room. A sign said, "Ask the nurse for triage information." When we asked, we were told to just have a seat and they'd get right to us. A teenage boy who had a high fever and looked at death's door came in after us. He slumped over the chair and looked miserable. We waited our turn and when we were called well over an hour later, didn't see the boy, so we assumed he had been taken in for treatment.

My husband's questions were resolved in five minutes, but on our way out, we found the teenage boy had gone outside in the blazing sun where the temperature was well into the 90's and passed out on the pathway. Another couple were bent over him and said he wasn't responding. We went inside again to tell his mother where he was. She seemed surprised he wasn't sitting next to her???? The other couple alerted the triage nurse and we went on our way.

Next time, we'll take that nurse's advice and call 911 rather than try to get anyone to talk to us. People coming in by ambulance get preferred treatment I'm told.