So this woman in Dallas walks into an emergency room. She thinks that she has a broken leg and since this an Associated Press link and it will go away soon I will quote at length:

A woman says she waited 19 hours at Parkland Memorial Hospital's emergency department for treatment of a broken leg and never did get to see a doctor — but still got a bill for $162. Amber Joy Milbrodt, who said she broke a bone in her leg while playing volleyball, received the bill two weeks after her Sept. 24 visit.

Parkland officials said the bill was appropriate because a nurse spent time checking her vital signs to assess her level of need.

But that's not how Milbrodt sees it. ''It should have been more like them paying me for having to sit in the emergency room for 19 hours,'' she told The Dallas Morning News.

The assessment by the nurse, which lasted a few minutes, established her place in line that night. By that time, Milbrodt said, she had already been waiting about 3 1/2 hours.

She still had not been called more than 15 hours later, so she gave up and went home. She an X-ray taken at a chiropractic school where she is a student had already confirmed that she had a fracture.

''She's not paying for waiting,'' says Rick Rhine, the hospital's vice president in charge of billing. ''She's paying for the assessment she received.''

Milbrodt, 29, who has no insurance, said she does not plan to pay. After leaving the ER, she rested at home for a few days and then put her leg in a brace, which she still wears. It seems to be healing, she said.

A few days before Milbrodt's visit, a 58-year-old man who went to the ER with stomach pains also waited 19 hours — and then suffered cardiac arrest and died.

Wonks Anonymous supposes that he could rail about the heartlessness of the hospital or the irresponsibility of the young woman who was playing volleyball without health insurance. He would rather use this space to observe just how well the American health care finance system is working.

As Wonks Anonymous observed very early on in the history of this blog: The United States already has universal health care. It's called the emergency room. Any hospital that opens an Emergency Room is liable to treat anyone who shows up with an emergency.

This can be a serious problem to even the best endowed hospital and for Hospitals like Parkland Memorial - let me guess, this is probably in the part of Dallas where the poor people live - the mandate to provide emergency care to all and sundry can result in bankruptcy.

It is not surprising, therefore, that waits are long and, from time to time, the triage nurse makes a mistake and someone dies of it. Nor is it surprising that the hospital tries to recover all of its costs. It needs every penny that it can get to cover its losses on the uninsured.

But cheer up. If Milbrodt's fracture gets infected she will eventually get the finest care that American Technology can provide and maybe even a high tech artificial limb. Lucky her.