Competition is good!

20-30 minutes at the Christ ER? Where do those numbers come from? I was delivered there last year with crippling pain and spent fifty minutes rolling around on their filthy lobby floor biting through a leather belt before they found a doctor to see me. This is with health insurance.

unless you're dying, just drive to bergen county and get amazing care from hospitals who dont need to brag about er times on billboards..

Hospitals Duel Over Wait Times

By LISA FLEISHER - The Wall Street Journal
April 13, 2011

Hospital emergency rooms can be unpleasant destinations. When the wait times seem to stretch forever, it just makes things worse.

Now, one northern New Jersey hospital is trying to lure patients from competing hospitals by bragging about its low average wait times in the emergency room. Bayonne Medical Center on Tuesday unveiled two billboards in Jersey City that are updated with the emergency-room wait times several times a day.

"When people face a medical emergency they want to know they're going to get high-quality care and they're going to be seen in a timely manner," Bayonne Chief Executive Officer Dan Kane said on Tuesday, when the wait time stood at 32 minutes. "They're going to wait far less than they would in any other area emergency department."

Wrong, said officials at nearby hospitals. They said their service was just as fast, and scoffed at the notion that patients would choose a hospital based on numbers flashed on billboards.

"It's going to take them 20 minutes to a half hour to get [to Bayonne Medical Center], and there are other hospitals in the area that are closer," said Paul Hebert, spokesman for Christ Hospital in Jersey City. "From a logistics standpoint, I don't think it's that great of an idea."

The wait time to see a doctor at Christ Hospital's emergency room averages between 20 and 30 minutes, Mr. Hebert said. The hospital plans to soon display its wait times on its website, something that he said was in works before Bayonne's billboards went up.

Joe Scott, the CEO of Jersey City Medical Center, said Bayonne was trying to steer people toward its emergency room to take advantage of higher compensation from insurance companies. The for-profit hospital doesn't have contracts with insurance companies and is considered out of network. "I'm sure that's their play," he said. Wait times at his hospital have averaged 37 minutes in the past three months.

Mr. Kane of Bayonne said his competitors' claims of comparable wait times were "puffery in the extreme." He said his hospital engaged an outside research firm that found patients wait three times longer at Jersey City Medical Center and two and a half times longer at Christ Hospital. He emphasized that under New Jersey law, patients entering the Bayonne emergency room wouldn't pay more, regardless of whether the insurance company considered the facility in or out of network.

Hospitals around the country have begun providing ER wait times on their websites, on Twitter and via text message, as well as on billboards