Hospitals are so full that the emergency room has become a waiting room. The Wall Street Journal reported that patients who have already been admitted spend 12 hours, and sometimes 24, on a stretcher in the hall because no bed will open upstairs.

The wait has been getting worse for years. A paper in Health Affairs found that in September 2017, about one in eight patients admitted through the emergency room waited at least four hours for a bed. By September 2024 it was one in four. The share kept in the emergency room for 24 hours or more tripled over those years. From April through June 2026, Vizient put the median wait for an inpatient bed at five hours, up 25 percent from the year before.

A Johns Hopkins study of emergency-room records from 2018 to 2024, published in Annals of Emergency Medicine, found that each extra hour of that wait raised the chance a patient would get worse. People miss medicine doses. The emergency staff is covering new arrivals and admitted patients at the same time. KFF Health News has called the boarding of admitted patients a public-health crisis, with some waits running to days.

The hospitals and the researchers name the same causes. There are not enough nurses. Patients are older, so the stays are longer. The bed upstairs stays full because a nursing home or a rehab bed is not ready. England has the same scene, which the BBC calls corridor care: in the north-west, more than 52,000 patients waited over 24 hours for a ward bed in a year. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said July 2026 was the worst July on record for 12-hour waits in England’s major emergency departments.

From the editor

An emergency room cannot turn a sick person away. That has been the law since 1986. If the person has no insurance, the hospital still has to look at them and stabilize them, and then the bill often does not get paid.

Customs and Border Protection recorded 10.8 million encounters nationwide from fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2024. A House Homeland Security tally adds about 2 million known gotaways on top of that. An encounter is not a person. The same man can be counted twice, and many were turned back. It is still a huge number of people, and it is not a count of 15 million patients walking into American emergency rooms with no insurance.

What is known about insurance is enough. A Kaiser Family Foundation and Los Angeles Times survey found that about half of likely undocumented adults had no health insurance, against about 8 percent of adults born here. Nearly four in ten said the emergency room was their only usual place to get care.

A hospital that is already keeping admitted patients in the hall does not have spare rooms. People with no doctor and no insurance go where the door is required to open. They add to a line that was already too long, and they do not pay. The researchers can talk about nurses and nursing homes. They should also count the people who were let in with no way to pay for a bed.