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My mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago. She later got a bill for $2800 although medicare paid for some of that. Turns out the hospital she went to had its own associated ambulance service which wasn’t the ambulance service that gave her the ride. She later got a second bill from the hospital’s ambulance service, also for $2800, even though they hadn’t even given her the ride (medicare naturally enough did not pay for any of this bill). My mom was going to pay this second bill because I guess her generation just pays every fucking bill that shows up in the mail no matter what, but I put my foot down and insisted that she didn’t. I had a lot of fun calling them up and yelling at them about this bullshit. They refused to retract the bill and sent it a few more times, but eventually they gave up and didn’t send it to collections.
A fun side note to this story is that the hospital system in question became in danger of bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. A vulture capitalist firm noticed that the value of just the hospital system’s real estate holdings was a lot more than the sale price, so they purchased it and ran up a ton more debt paying themselves more than a billion dollars in bonuses. Then they spun off the real estate as a separate entity to which the hospitals started paying rent, which increased their operating deficit and debt still further. Eventually the hospitals declared bankruptcy and were closed down, leaving an entire city (of poor black people, natch) without any hospitals at all. Capitalism is just so awesome.
Gets out of the hospital, goes to a new school in this strange new place, gets shot, winds up back in the same hospital
When Truck-kun sends you straight to hell.
Only $1400 for an ambulance ride? Must be the co-pay on insurance. My last ambulance ride cost me ~$5000 and that was in 2008.
Idk, going off Manhua also applies to south Korea
Someone once said an ambulance isn’t your personal taxi to the hospital, like my brother in fuck what do you think it is then?
At the risk of getting myself a rain of downvotes here:
An ambulance is an expensive and somewhat rare mini-ER on wheels that’s designed to help a small team of expensive and somewhat rare specialists stabilize a dangerous condition on a patient until it reaches a hospital. Since it is important to keep those somewhat rare vehicles and teams in reserve for when they are suddenly urgently needed, you really shouldn’t use one as a taxi to the hospital if whatever your condition is doesn’t call for that.
(Asking enormous sums of money of the patient for the privilege is IMHO still wrong. The decision to use an ambulance or not should not be based on whether you can can easily part with a couple thousand dollars.)
So triage the issue remotely and send the appropriate response.
Stubbed toe? Reimburse a ride share.
Fractured arm? EMT in a lower cost van.
Urgent trauma? Full rig and EMT crew.
There is NOTHING expensive about the people in the back of that ambulance. They get paid less than I do working at a grocery store.
There is in the sense that they cannot easily be replaced. Whether they actually get paid appropriately for that is another story.
I don’t believe there is a problem of people needlessly calling ambulances.
If that was the case, the appropriate response would not be to charge everyone bank breaking fees for it.
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If that’s the case, I imagine it would be better to charge people for frivolous use, rather than charge everyone. Or come up with a system where dispatch sends something else for non-emergency, if you can tell.
I’m not a policy expert, but the current system is bad for everyone.
I’d be more ok with this if the expensive specialists on board were actually making bank instead of really low wages.
Exactly, its your personal free ride. Not like a taxi at all.
Yep. It’s free, it’s faster, and it has in-vehicle catering!
$1,400 is actually super cheap for an ambulance ride. I think they’re typically closer to $14,000
Usually more 3-5,000 for the ride. More medicine extra but most ambulance rides dont need extra.
Also somehow the paramedics doing the care are getting like minimum wage…its such a scam.
Some places in the US the EMTs are volunteer-only and don’t get paid anything…
I just realized that we don’t pay volunteer EMTs or Firefighters. And of course, I’m sure fulltime police officers outnumber the fulltime staffing of both firefighters and EMTs.
How the fuck have we survived this long?
I checked and 2 years ago the average cost was indeed about $1400:
Probably more now, although I doubt 10× as much…
I think there are two prices There’s the price they charge if you are paying “out of pocket” and the price they invoice insurance. It is possible for both the $1400 and $14000 ($6k is more likely) to be true.
Pricing is weird in the US.
One of the main reasons the list price is so high is because they know the insurance companies will negotiate and reduce the price. It’s like if you’re listing something on eBay or Marketplace and want $500 for it, you might list it for $600 or $650, because you know buyers will negotiate down to $500.
However, they can’t charge the insurance one amount while charging out-of-pocket customers a lower amount, because they’ll be sued by the insurance companies for insurance fraud.
Because of that, hospitals, ambulances, etc. need to initially charge everyone the same inflated prices, but they’ll basically always offer a discount if you say you’re paying out of pocket.
more than double Australia’s $622 average.
I’m from Melbourne in Australia (but living in the US now). In Melbourne, we pay around $60/year for an ambulance membership, and every ambulance ride (both road and air) is 100% covered.
It’s also included in most private insurance plans. We have a hybrid system where there’s both a public health care system (Medicare) as well as a private one. For whatever reason, ambulances aren’t included as part of the public system.
That’s probably a factor (insurers make enough payments to hospitals they can demand lower prices and get them while out of pocket people usually don’t have much power to negotiate), but also this article makes it sound like $1400 is just the base price,
The report estimates the average ambulance ride in the United States costs $1,383.44, more than double Australia’s $622 average. The gap widens further with mileage fees: Americans pay about $19.49 per mile, while most other countries charge little to nothing based on distance traveled.
What
Wrong, its about $1500. Dont give misinfo. Its still idiodic it costs anything but dont lie
It’s possible that having insurance can change things, but I’ve known people who’s insurance didn’t cover an ambulance trip that ended up costing them nearly 10k. Out of network medical costs are a bitch.
That makes sense.
Japan was mentioned so my brain kept trying to do right to left
Why in the Tom Nook do I always wake up with amnesia and debts???
What kind of healthcare system do they have in Japan? I actually have no idea.
It’s both heavily subsidised by the government and heavily regulated to ensure access to quality care.
For an otherwise healthy adult, you’d pay ~30% of the cost. BUT there are laws that ensure privately-run healthcare facilities can only charge the same amount as publicly-run ones. So even at full cost, these prices are very low compared to the US.
There are also caps on how much someone will spend in a month, so even long-lasting illnesses/disabilities won’t bankrupt you.
A normal one. Not perfect, but not a bizarre torture device for anyone not deliriously wealthy
This would actually be a pretty good idea.
Damnit, Truck-kun!
I’ve never seen a better PSA to look both ways before crossing the road
