To the Editor:

My wife and my 5-month-old baby were rear-ended today. The back window of her SUV was completely destroyed, and pieces of it flew into the car and hit my daughter's face, very close to her left eye. My wife sustained severe back, head and neck pain. I took them to Huntington Hospital Emergency Room, in Pasadena. After waiting for over two hours, we had seen a total of 7 administrative assistants, who went to great lengths to fill out all kinds of paperwork and even weighed the baby, but the only doctor who could see them was still busy and would be so for an estimated three additional hours, said the last of the administrative assistants we talked to. We decided to leave, convinced that a bed and a night's rest would be better therapy than the attention we were receiving at what's considered a premiere hospital in the richest country in the world during the biggest economic boom in the country's history. There is no other country in the world with a larger ratio of assistants per doctor, and yet the bottleneck for medical attention is doctors, not paperwork fillers. Could our medical authorities please take note and change their hiring priorities?

Alex Backer