We’re all pretending this is an unsolvable problem when really most of the world has solved it by making ambulance (EMS) funding similar to fire and police departments. Somehow in any emergency I’ve seen, all three show up, often EMS before police or fire dept, and somehow that’s a service that has to be supplemented by insurance billings.

The blog mentions it, but it’s one of those obvious things that somehow isn’t solved yet and blows my mind every time it comes up.

> most of the world has solved it by making ambulance (EMS) funding similar to fire...

About 65% of the more than one million firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers, with nearly 19,000 fire departments being run completely by volunteers.

I'm volunteering to help build out a nonprofit EMS authority that will tax residents and businesses in our local six boroughs to spread out the costs for ambulance transports.

We hope to set the rates such that folks won't have to pay at all if they have insurance or will only have to pay the gap amount insurance would have covered.

I'm collecting the data to figure out how many residents, how many businesses, and how many college students there are in the region and match that to the call volume for those same categories so that each group pays a fair share.

We're basing the legal structure in the MESA group from Lancaster PA. Public fee hearings with residents hopefully start this Fall, and then we're hoping to go live Jan 2027.

I will say I've been surprised how extremely expensive it is to run EMS. Even with 25% of our responders being volunteers, the costs are staggering. Insurance, equipment, medicines, payroll, billing, fuel, building maintenance, heating and cooling.

The vehicle maintenance would turn your hair grey. We have a vehicle in the shop almost every single day. And we have two volunteer mechanics trying to do fixes in house. But these ambulances just are absolutely beat to hell 24 hours a day. My partner is one of the mechanics, and she sometimes gets a half dozen vehicle maintenance reports a day! And we only have 7 vehicles!

And then you have to factor in deprecation on an asset that effectively drops to $0 after 5 years. And costs $300k to replace.

We pinch every penny we can think of, but the end effect is that we're trying to provide a service that's extremely expensive and so we hope this model will diffuse those costs across the whole population (which we expect will turn out to be something like $100/year per family).

Cross your fingers because this feels like our best option

But if we fixed it, that might help people who can't afford the ride otherwise. And we cannot have that.

  --- Says far too many people, always.

The ambulance that billed me in San Francisco after my accident was run by San Francisco Fire Department.

Story up thread is about an ambulance ride by the San Francisco Fire Department charging a grand. So in essence the EMS funding is the fire department funding and it’s still unsolved.

Health care in general has been solved by state sponsored medicine in most industrialized nations. And when it isn't solved by directly state sponsored medicine, it's solved by formally and informally regulated monopolies. In fact, US health care in the 1960s was made reasonable by the Blue Shield regulated monopoly.

The thing about unfettered private health is that it finds "profit centers" and pumps them ruthlessly. But the problem when scheme/scam gets reigned in (say out-of-plan doctors), another appears (out-of-plan ambulances) and there's no end to the situation. Only actual state sponsored health care can end this.

Very much so. We could fix this. We continue to choose not to, and will for some time into the future.

Tangentially (think in systems), much of the US exists off of volunteer emergency services (fire and emt), which is rapidly evaporating. Average age of these volunteers is mid 50s.

https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/nfpa-journal/20...

> For generations, volunteers have formed the backbone of the nation’s emergency response system. Roughly half of the U.S. population, some 170 million people, live in areas primarily served by volunteer departments. Unpaid firefighters comprise more than 60 percent of all U.S. firefighters, and more than 80 percent of the country’s fire departments are either all or mostly volunteer.

https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/publications/1596

> 4.5 million people lived in an ambulance desert (AD); 2.3 million (52%) of them in rural counties. Four out of five counties (82%) had at least one AD. Rural counties were more likely to have ADs (84%) than urban counties (77%). Areas with the highest share and number of people living in ADs include the Appalachian region in the South; Western states with difficult mountainous terrain; coastal areas across the U.S.; and the rural mountainous areas of Maine, Vermont, Oregon, and Washington. Eight states had fewer than three ambulances covering every 1,000 square miles of land area (the Western states of Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, New Mexico, and Idaho; and the Midwestern states of North Dakota and South Dakota).

the reverse side of that medal is that in 'most of the world' EMS quality is ass.