But as the recession continues, many officials of the college of emergency doctors predict it is only a matter of time until the rising number of uninsured and the delays in getting primary care create a crisis.

“I think we’re seeing the tip,” said Dr. Nicholas J. Jouriles, the group’s current president. Patients, he said, will have no choice but to come to the emergency department when they have no money or insurance. “They will get turned away elsewhere,” he said.

One of the doctors’ major concerns is the long waits by patients requiring a hospital bed. The doctors group, surveying its members last year, learned of at least 200 deaths related to the practice of “boarding”  in which patients on stretchers line the corridors until they can be moved into a bed.

“Crowding is a national public health problem,” said Dr. Jesse M. Pines, an emergency physician in Philadelphia.

Patients forced to wait for hours on end for a bed clearly suffer.

“It was pure hell,” recalled Robert Roth, whose 90-year-old mother, Kato, last year spent 36 hours at the emergency department of a Queens hospital, near her home in Jackson Heights, waiting for a room after going to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Mrs. Roth, who had a recent series of falls, said she had been hearing music in her ears, and both her son and the doctor he called were worried about a possible stroke.

After the first five hours of waiting, she became increasingly disoriented and delusional. Mr. Roth was unable to stay with her during the entire wait. After he left and returned, he said, the hospital staff told him they had no idea where she was. She turned up in an empty room off the emergency department, and her physical and mental condition had clearly deteriorated, Mr. Roth said. She believed that she had been kidnapped.

When she had to go several weeks later to another emergency department in Manhattan, she endured a 20-hour wait for a room, again becoming disoriented after several hours, forcing her to be sedated.