A Cure For Healthcare Costs.

       I'm reminded of the mistake of getting sick or injured on a Friday. Bad mistake. If you need medical attention on Friday chances are you won't be able to get that attention until Monday. Especially if you have to go to the hospital.  Hospitals only operate on Monday through Thursday. Doctors offices never operated on Wednesdays. But for hospitals, it's the weekend. That's just the way it is.
       When you arrive at the hospital on a Friday here's the way it works. First you spend several hours getting checked in. It's not like a hotel where you sign your name and get your keys. Especially if you haven't gone through any pre-admission testing. Pre-admission testing could take as much as half a day. By then, all the testing and operating sections of the hospital are shutting down for the weekend. So no matter what your problem is, broken leg, heart attack or whatever, you're stabilized and put in the holding pattern.
       If you've ever experienced a delay in an airplane and have to spend time in a holding pattern  you at least know that you're gonna get out of that airplane sometime within that day or night. Not so with a hospital. You're there until Monday at the earliest.  That means you pay for room and board plus special care for two days while making no headway towards any improvement in your situation.
       After two days and thousands of dollars or potentially tens of thousands of dollars in billings, the hospital staff and corp of specialists are ready to get down to work on you. That is unless your particular specialist is unavailable on Mondays. In which case you will get to spend another day and night in suspended animation. But finally the appointed time arrives and you get to have done what could easily have been done two days earlier if they had folks on call like other 24/7 systems do.
       And you wonder why our healthcare costs keep mounting? Weekends are hospital's biggest single income producers. Half the staff has the weekend off, but you're still stuck there. And paying there.