ArcaMax

I haven't been in any kind of medical facility that wasn't understaffed by at least 20%, not for 15 years, and that 15 years includes my knee surgery, the death of my mother- and father-in-law, the death of my mother, and my wife's hysterectomy. I figure it's just a matter of time until your loved one goes in the hospital, and you have to bring them three meals a day from home because there aren't enough workers in the hospital kitchen.

I can tell these places are at least 20% understaffed because I've worked in places that were understaffed by at least 20%, and everything got slower, less reliable and dirtier.

Sometimes, the places where I worked were understaffed because the company figured out they could just barely get the work done with fewer salaries, and just barely was good enough if the stockholders were making money. Sometimes, the company was slowly going out of business, and the bosses cut the number of workers to try and keep the company going.

Most recently, I went with my wife, Deborah, to a walk-in center so we could find out she had pneumonia and get a pocketful of prescriptions and spend four hours in the place, over half of which was wait time. Still, when your wife's cough sounds like the noise an old walrus makes when he's mad, and her doctor has said she has an open appointment in four days, you walk into anyplace that lets you walk in and wait.

Maybe five more people working there and they could have cut the wait by half, but what the hell. The insurance companies won't make 'em hire more people, and we have insurance, and getting at our insurance is what these people really do for a living. They'll even take that lousy government poor people insurance that half the dentists in the city won't touch.

We stumbled out in the early evening and headed off to our local pharmacy to fill the prescriptions.

"Let's stop and get something to eat," my wife said.

In our two-person, childless, cat-owning family, "something to eat" means McDonald's, and there's one near the pharmacy. I call it the "Sad Man Cafe," because if I'm eating there, something's wrong and no one wants to cook, or someone's in the hospital.

And half of my wife's french fries were undercooked, and what I guess they call "the restaurant" was dirty, and the trash can was overflowing, and there was half-a-hamburger on the floor of the men's room, and our food wasn't hot.

I looked behind the counter and all the folks on the food production line were working very fast, so I figured they were 20 or 30% understaffed.

At the pharmacy, they were out of one of the pills we needed, and my wife was trying to hold back her walrus-like honks, and we took what they had, and I said I'd come back the next day. On the way out, I noticed the carpet was dirty. I was a janitor in college. I notice dirty floors and full trash cans and dirty bathrooms.

I've been going to that pharmacy for 25 years, and I've never seen it run with fewer employees. The staff shrinks every year. No doubt that same thing is true of the company delivering the pills my wife needed.

Guys my age say, "No one wants to work anymore," but about 95% of the people in America are working, so most people want to and do work.

No one says it, but America may not be able to afford to send all the illegal immigrants home. If we do, things will get worse. Either that, or understaffing is a callous, deliberate way to keep costs down and prices up.

For those of us dining at The Sad Man Cafe, neither one is good.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.