Close-up view of health issue shows its complexity

I spent a month in a hospital room with my ill daughter last week.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but there's something about hours — and then days — of being cooped up in a little room that makes it seem as though the walls are closing in. No matter how many creature comforts the hospital provides — and there are many at Primary Children's Medical Center — it is not a place one aspires to be.

But it is an interesting place from the standpoint of appreciating the need for health-care reform.

Spend some time in an emergency room waiting room and you'll have a whole new sensibility about access to health care. Too many people don't have anywhere else to go. While an adult might hesitate to endure long waits in an emergency room waiting room, parents will go to any lengths to make sure their children receive medical treatment. They know they won't be turned away, regardless of their ability to pay, which is the moral and humane thing to do. But it's an economic conundrum just the same. It's a price we all bear when significant numbers of people are uninsured or under-insured and don't have access to primary care.

Seemingly, timing is everything when it comes to encounters with the health-care system. We happened to arrive at the hospital a little bit ahead of an anticipated uptick in patients.

My daughter's room was filled with her in her hospital bed, the computer used for record-keeping, medical equipment, a chair and a cot. Then a nurse said something that made my blood run cold. "You should see this place when we're double bunking. It's crazy."

Double bunking. It's a term I hadn't heard since I reported on Utah's prison system back in the early 1990s. I've been trying to wrap my mind around the concept of two more warm bodies sharing the little room to which my daughter was assigned. Add to that the stress that patients and their loved ones experience under these circumstances. It wasn't happenstance that nearly every health-care worker we encountered asked my daughter and me whether we had received our seasonal flu shots.

Hospitals operate on fairly thin margins. If a mass casualty event occurred at the peak of flu season, the economic impact could be devastating, not to mention the personal toll that would be exacted of health-care providers and support staff.