It's 5:15 p.m. when two nurses pull back the curtain to speak with Martha Breaux about her chest pains. She has been in the emergency room at East Jefferson Hospital in New Orleans since 5 a.m.
Considering how long she's been there, the elderly patient is in amazing spirits.
"The doctors and nurses have been great," she tells me. "There's just no room to put me in."
This is the norm these days here in New Orleans. Only five hospitals remain open in the area post-Hurricane Katrina. Couple that with the fact that as many as 40 percent of doctors have left the area in the past seven months, according to the Orleans Parish Medical Society, and it's clear why overcrowding is a problem.
On top of that, the hospitals still open are bleeding money, in part because they're treating more uninsured patients than they were before Katrina.
Until it flooded after the hurricane, Charity Hospital had been treating most of the uninsured patients in New Orleans, bolstered by more than $400 million in annual state funding.
But with Charity closed, the remaining hospitals are picking up much of Charity's work. They are doing this without most of the $400 million that Charity had been receiving, because the state eliminated the bulk of this money from its budget, another result of its post-Katrina financial crisis.
Local health officials have lobbied lawmakers in Baton Rouge and Washington, D.C., for extra funding, but they have come back empty-handed, dire news for a city struggling to provide health care to its residents.
