A new report released by the U.S. House of Representative on Monday clearly states that emergency trauma centers in hospitals in seven major U.S. cities lack the ability to treat victims of a significant terrorist strike or natural disaster.

“If a terrorist attack had occurred on March 25 when we did our survey, the consequences would have been catastrophic. The emergency care systems were stretched to the breaking point and had no capacity to respond to a surge of victims,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, as quoted by the USA Today. He called the situation “truly alarming.”

“Hospital Emergency Surge Capacity: Not Ready for the Predictable Surprise,” as the report was named, examined the ability of 34 hospitals in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City and Washington to handle a national emergency. The survey was taken March 25 at 4:30 p.m. local time in each city, a time chosen because it was neither the busiest nor the slowest time of day in emergency rooms.

And “the results of the survey show that none of the hospitals surveyed in the seven cities had sufficient emergency care capacity to respond to an attack generating the number of casualties that occurred in Madrid,” the report said. Nearly 1,000 victims were transported to 15 hospitals and 270 victims arrived at a single hospital for emergency care after the incident.

Moreover, it was found that Washington D.C.’s emergency rooms were operating above capacity, which means new patients must wait in hallways, waiting rooms or offices.

Physicians and other health workers should undergo intensive training and preparation before an attack, so to be able to save as many lives as possible.

Waxman said the report is meant to highlight the need to protect the nation’s major trauma centers from Medicaid cuts planned by the Bush administration. These changes due to take effect on May 26 could annually cost the country’s 34 Level 1 trauma centers a total of $623 million in lost federal funding and potentially $600 million in lost state funding.

Medicaid cuts will lead to reduction in personnel and “readiness will occur in our hospitals and emergency departments across the country. And even worse, it will occur in the midst of a serious and intractable nursing and nursing faculty shortage and limit our ability to respond to a disaster, particularly a blast or explosive injury with serious burns,” warned Colleen Conway Welsh, dean of Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, according to the Washington Times.

Not only that U.S. hospitals have insufficient sources to deal with too many patients at once, but, according to a study by HealthGrades, a health care ratings organization(called Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study), from 2004 through 2006, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S. Medicare Patients and cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion.

The analysis found that about 1.1 million medical errors happened in the U.S. hospitals over the three-year period. Moreover, other findings of the study showed that patients experiencing a medical error had a 20 percent chance of dying; failure to rescue accounted for at least 188,000 lives lost, about 128 deaths for every 1,000 patients; bed sores, failure to rescue and post-operative respiratory failure accounted for 63.4 percent of incidents.

With all these facts given, we shall wonder where the U.S. medical service is heading and who we shall trust our lives. Is personnel’s lack of training a major cause for all these medical errors? And there are many other questions without answers in a field which should be a top priority for everyone.