The system itself reminded me of here as far as the operational part went.  It was very smooth overall, the only hitch was I got stuck behind an ambulance case at the emergency dept.  But even there it wasn't so bad.

I shudder to think what some poor monolingual german would suffer through if he came to a small town hospital here with strange symptoms that weren't reducible to pantomime.  The financial part of it is still being played out, and it was nice that they just jumped right in and did the treatment first.  I don't think they had seen a lot of blue cross cards.  On the positive side for us, my wife had gotten an emergency number from blue cross, on the negative side its not manned at night or on the weekends.  Try to schedule any emergencies during business hours.

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson