In response to my post about the waiting times in British emergency rooms, Michael Malak writes:
"At Fairfax Hospital, the most well-known hospital in Fairfax County, Virginia, the wait is typically six hours from my experience. This is due, of course, to the socialistic Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act signed by Reagan in 1986 that forces emergency rooms to accept all regardless of ability to pay (thus immigrants use it as their primary care physician).
"I find it difficult to believe that this consequence was not foreseen by Congress and Reagan. The public seemed to be in the dark about it, as both the Washington Post and New York Times archives return no hits about it in 1986. Like the preferential treatment of HMO's signed by Nixon and highlighted in Michael Moore's Sicko, this was just another covert step by the supposedly free-market Republicans on the march to Hillarycare."
