The emergency department waiting room was jammed, as it always is, with patients sitting for hours, closely packed on hard metal chairs. Only those with conditions so dire they needed immediate care — like a heart attack — got seen immediately.

One man had had enough. He pounded on the glass window in front of the receptionist before storming out. As he left, he assaulted a nurse taking a smoking break. “Hard at work?” he called, as he strode off.

No, the event was not real, but it was art resembling life on “The Pitt,” the Max series that will stream its season finale on Thursday. The show takes place in a fictional Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency room. But the underlying theme — appalling overcrowding — is universal in this country. And it is not easy to fix.

“EDs are gridlocked and overwhelmed,” the American College of Emergency Physicians reported in 2023, referring to emergency departments.

“The system is at the breaking point,” said Dr. Benjamin S. Abella, chair of the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York.

“The Pitt” follows emergency room doctors, nurses, medical students, janitors and staff hour by hour over a single day as they deal with all manner of medical issues, ranging from a child who drowned helping her little sister get out of a swimming pool to a patient with a spider in her ear. There were heart attacks and strokes, overdoses, a patient with severe burns, an influencer poisoned by heavy metals in a skin cream.

Because this is television, many of the thorny problems get neatly resolved in the show’s 15 episodes. A woman who seems to have abandoned her elderly mother returns, apologizing because she fell asleep. Parents whose son died from an accidental fentanyl overdose come around to donating his organs. A pregnant teenager and her mother, at odds over a medical abortion, come to a resolution following a wise doctor’s counsel.

But over and over again, the image is of a system working way beyond its capacity. There is the jammed waiting room and the “boarders” — patients parked in emergency rooms or hallways for days or longer because there are no hospital beds. (The American College of Emergency Physicians calls boarding a “national public health crisis.”)

There are the long waits for simple tests. There is the hallway medicine — patients who see a doctor in the hallway, not in a private area, because there is no place else to put them.

And there is the violence, verbal and physical, from patients with mental problems and those, like the man who punched the nurse, who just get fed up.

“‘The Pitt’ shows the duress the system is under,” Dr. Abella said. “Across the country we see this day in and day out.”

But why can’t this problem be fixed?

Because there’s no simple solution, said Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, co-director of the Health Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. The problem, he said is “multipronged and there is no magic wand.”

Part of it is money.

Having patients jammed up in emergency rooms guarantees that no bed will go unused, bolstering revenues for hospitals.

Then there’s the problem of discharging patients. Spaces are scarce in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers, so patients ready to leave the hospital often are stuck waiting for a space to open up elsewhere.

Schedules are another difficulty, said Dr. Jeremy S. Faust, attending physician in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine. Many rehabilitation centers admit patients only during business hours, he said. If an E.R. patient is ready to be discharged to one during a weekend, that patient has to wait.

In “The Pitt,” as in real life, patients often show up in emergency rooms with problems — like a child with an earache — that a private doctor should be able to handle. Why don’t they just go to their own doctor instead of waiting hours to be seen?

One reason, Dr. Emanuel said, is that “primary care is going to hell in a handbasket.”

In many cities finding a primary care doctor is difficult. And even if you have one, getting an appointment can take days or weeks.

Many do not want to wait.

“The modern mentality, for better or worse, is: If I can’t get it now, I will look for other solutions,” Dr. Abella said.

That often means the emergency room.

Even building larger emergency rooms has not helped with the overcrowding.

Dr. Faust said that his hospital opened a new emergency room a few years ago with a large increase in the number of beds. A colleague, giving him a tour, proudly told him there was now so much space there would probably be no more hallway patients.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Bwhahahahaha,’” Dr. Faust said. “If you build it, they will come.”

He was right.

In a rare sit-down interview with CBS News, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, recommended the measles vaccine and said he was “not familiar” with sweeping cuts to state and local public health programs.

The conversation was taped shortly after his visit to West Texas, where he attended the funeral of an 8-year-old girl who died after contracting measles. A raging outbreak there has sickened more than 500 people and killed two young children.

In clips of the discussion released Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy offered one of his strongest endorsements yet of the measles vaccine. “People should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those,” he said.

A few moments later, however, he raised safety concerns about the shot, as he has previously: “We don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested,” he said.

For months, Mr. Kennedy has faced intense criticism for his handling of the West Texas outbreak from medical experts who believe that his failure to offer a full-throated endorsement of immunization has hampered efforts to contain the virus.

Moreover, he has promoted unproven treatments for measles, like cod liver oil. Doctors in Texas believe its use is tied to signs of liver toxicity in some children arriving in local hospitals.

Throughout the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy has often paired support for vaccines with discussions of safety concerns about the shots, along with “miraculous” alternative treatments.

Over the weekend, he posted on social media that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was “the most effective way” to prevent the spread of measles — a statement met with relief from infectious disease experts and with fury from his vaccine-hesitant base.

That night, he posted again, this time applauding “two extraordinary healers” who he claimed had effectively treated roughly 300 measles-stricken children with budesonide, a steroid, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic.

Scientists say there are no cures for a measles infection, and that claiming otherwise undermines the importance of a vaccination.

Later in the CBS interview, Mr. Kennedy was pressed on the administration’s recent move to halt more than $12 billion in federal grants to state programs that address infectious disease, mental health and childhood vaccinations, among other efforts.

(A judge has temporarily blocked the cuts after a coalition of states sued the Trump administration.)

Mr. Kennedy said he wasn’t familiar with the interruptions, then asserted that they were “mainly D.E.I. cuts,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have been targeted by the Trump administration.

Dr. Jonathan LaPook, CBS’s medical correspondent, asked about specific research cuts at universities, including a $750,000 grant to researchers at the University of Michigan to study adolescent diabetes.

“I didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at,” Mr. Kennedy said. “There’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them.”