Although today is Easter, I'm off to work at my job as a licensed health care provider for the state of California. Hospitals and long-term care health facilities never close. Cops, firefighters, doctors and nurses fill positions to maintain operations 24/7, 365 days of the year.

As the population has increased, Temecula officials have invested in additional emergency service personnel, equipment and technology to provide the best protection for city residents. All those remarkable efforts toward public safety come to an abrupt halt where public service meets privatized health care.

One reason I chose a career in civil service some 30 years ago was a benefits package that includes health insurance. I'm very fortunate to be able to see my doctor for checkups and have prescriptions filled for a nominal co-payment, but when it comes to care in a local emergency room, I'm playing the waiting game along with everybody else.

That is not to suggest that those with insurance deserve preferential treatment, but I presume that those with the greatest urgent medical need are rightly seen first.

There have been letters to the editor complaining about long waits at the two local emergency rooms and accounts of patients on gurneys in hallways waiting for a bed. Southwest Healthcare System has struggled to expand Inland Valley and Rancho Springs medical centers and intends to build a third hospital in Temecula once the dust of litigation settles. One corporation holds a monopoly on Southwest Riverside County hospitals.

From a business standpoint, it's probably most profitable to run hospitals at full capacity and delay building a new facility until there is adequate demand, but those calculations can be at odds with what is ultimately healthy for patients and the well-being of the community.

What might have happened if Enron were in the health care business instead of energy? Would they have manipulated the medical marketplace to create a situation of low supply and high demand as they did with energy commodities?

I have no bone to pick with Southwest Healthcare and, in fact, they did a great job of screwing a couple of my neck bones together, but I don't know if it's wise to put all of our hospital beds in one corporate basket.

The mere suggestion of socialized medicine causes some people to go into conniptions, but seeing how Temecula's police and fire departments are constantly improving to reduce response times and provide the best possible emergency aid, I have to say our socialized law enforcement, and emergency service agencies have done a better job at responding to growth than has our local privatized hospital system.

For all the money that gets diverted through Medicare and various government health subsidy programs, we would be better off investing that money in building and staffing actual health care facilities to compete with or augment privatized health care.

Government does do a few things right and due to the diligence of public agencies; a patient can be stabilized and delivered to a local hospital during the initial critical minutes of a medical emergency. Once there, it can take many hours and many miles to find a hospital bed.

Patients seem to fare better in the public service side of health care than on the privatized side.

- Paul Jacobs of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: TemeculaPaul@aol.com.