Pennsylvania residents are sharing their frustrations with the state’s emergency rooms after new data revealed patients are spending some of the longest periods in the country in emergency departments. From hours spent sitting in emergency departments to eye-watering medical bills, locals say the numbers reflect a problem many of them already know all too well.
According to PhillyVoice, patients at Pennsylvania hospitals spend an average of around three hours and 30 minutes in emergency departments before being discharged. That gives Pennsylvania the ninth-longest average in the country, with visits now lasting 33 minutes longer than they did in 2019.
Pennsylvania isn’t alone in dealing with lengthy emergency room visits, but its numbers place it firmly toward the wrong end of the national rankings. The data measures the time between a patient arriving at an emergency department and eventually being discharged, meaning the three-and-a-half-hour figure covers the entire ER visit rather than simply the time spent sitting in the waiting room.
Some Pennsylvania patients are facing considerably longer visits depending on where they seek care. The five hospitals with the longest emergency department times are all in the Philadelphia region, led by Penn Presbyterian Medical Center at five hours and 16 minutes, followed by Lankenau Medical Center at just over five hours. Several other hospitals in the area reported average visits approaching five hours, too.
Pennsylvania Patients Share Their ER Experiences
The lengthy visits certainly came as no surprise to Pennsylvania residents on Reddit, with several sharing their own frustrations about trying to get medical care. One resident summed up the experience bluntly: “You’ll sit there for 5-8 hours and they’ll charge you a fortune and tell you to call your primary care physician who will then schedule you an appointment for 3 months from now and tell you if it’s an emergency you should go to the ER. Repeat.”
For others, the long waits raised questions about how much Americans are already paying for healthcare. “I’m told that that’s a drawback of universal health care,” one person wrote. “Are you telling me I’m getting absolutely price gouged by my insurance companies paying high deductible and I still gotta wait?”
Another commenter responded, “Well, it’s a lie that’s often spread about universal healthcare to get dumb Americans to embrace being [expletive] by the insurance companies.”
Perhaps the most concerning perspective, however, came from a commenter who appeared to work in an emergency department. They described an ER that is frequently packed and barely staffed, with hospital beds already full as more ambulances continue to arrive. “I feel stretched to my limit balancing high acuity cases and transfers while more ambulances just roll on in,” they wrote, before adding, “Feels like real time collapse of the healthcare system.”
For Pennsylvania residents, these numbers are more than just another ranking. They represent hours spent in waiting rooms when people are already sick, worried or in pain, while the workers trying to help them are often stretched thin themselves. The experiences shared online show that the frustration is being felt on both sides of the emergency room doors, and many locals clearly hope something changes before those waits get even longer.
