A few weeks ago, my sister had trouble breathing. She was running a high fever, her head hurt and she looked unusually weak and uncomfortable. My parents immediately rushed her to urgent care, where medical staff transferred her to the emergency room after a 30-minute wait.
With the California and Federal government spending over $197 billion annually on healthcare, you would think that our state’s medical facilities work the way they are supposed to — quickly and consistently, even in stressful situations (Legislative Analyst’s Office).
But my sister’s hospital visit stalled. She was given cough pills and kept in the waiting room for two hours while coughing nonstop. When we walked out, we left without an explanation — just the same symptoms and the fear that a serious condition had been overlooked.
Days later, after a separate appointment with another doctor, we finally received an answer: pneumonia, a mild to life-threatening infection that can flood the lungs and restrict breathing. A patient can show up to the ER short of breath with a severe fever and still walk out with no formal diagnosis. This is a reflection of the inefficiencies and structural failures in our healthcare system.
On the patient’s side, the cost of insurance and treatment makes those problems worse. Even with insurance, getting ill can feel like a financial risk, especially as premiums continue to rise with the average proposed rate increasing around 10.3% in 2026 (Covered California). For Californians, that means paying more every month just for insurance and paying again through deductibles and copays when they actually need healthcare services. Just this year, over 400,000 people are projected to drop their coverage and go uninsured due to the surge in premiums (The Merced Focus).
This financial pressure is one of the main reasons why Californians treat the ER like a last resort (California Health Care Foundation). It’s not because they don’t think they require medical attention — it’s because they are afraid of what the bill will look like afterward. This introduces an additional issue of people seeking delayed treatment; in fact, 36% of adults claimed they skipped or postponed treatment due to affordability concerns (KFF). Due to that fear, what could have been treated in scheduled appointments escalates into a severe medical emergency that requires costly interventions anyway.
As a result, more people show up at ERs, regularly exceeding hospital capacities. In California, ER visits increased 17% from 2013 to 2023, reaching a peak of 14.9 million visits annually, while the number of emergency departments remained relatively stable (California Health Care Foundation). When more people visit an invariable number of ERs, waiting times inevitably skyrocket; serious conditions do not receive adequate attention amidst the surge of patients.
Our healthcare crisis is not only about a shortage of physical space in the ER. This shortage also extends to staffing. California does not have enough doctors to meet the demands of over 35 million insured residents. As of now, our state meets only the bare minimum recommended levels of primary care physicians. With a current shortfall of around 1,550 primary care doctors, projected to rise to 4,100 by 2030, Californians pay the price of declining healthcare quality (UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative).
But these failures do not stem from indifference alone. California faces constraints to these shortcomings — a growing population, rising labor costs, doctor burnout triggered by the pandemic and doctors who can’t keep up with medical demand. To increase the efficiency of healthcare in California, the government must invest more in areas where these issues are most prominent, whether that’s spending more on primary care capacity to ensure that fewer cases become emergencies, or expanding loan-repayment programs for doctors to increase the number of primary care doctors. Emergency rooms should act as safety nets for people facing life-threatening situations, but until our funding helps solve the root problems of our healthcare system, rather than being absorbed by inflation, patients will continue to face lackluster care.
Detecting my sister’s pneumonia should have been straightforward on the first doctor’s part. Yet, after waiting in a crowded room for hours just for the doctor’s lack of diagnosis, I saw just how inconsistent the California healthcare system can be. For a state that spends 20% of its budget on healthcare, the minimum expectation is reliability, but right now, we are paying into a system that feels like a gamble of our lives.
