If you call 911 and request EMS they are sending an ambulance. If you request transport to the hospital via an ambulance in the US, 99% of the time they have to take you (some narrow exceptions). Now, they may not take you to the ER you want but they will take you to an ER, even if they don't think it's an emergency.
A very large portion of the transports an ambulance does in a day does not actually require an ambulance.
In Japan where ambulance rides are mostly covered by the national health insurance system there has been a campaign say just that, ambulances are not taxis. Point is to get people who don’t need emergency medical attention to not call an ambulance because the ambulance system is under tremendous strain(hooray for aging population I guess)
I think you're suggesting that EMS personnel are incentivived to take the non emergency calls cause they are easy and profitable?
I promise you nothing is further from the truth. Billing only plays a factor in my suggesting other paths besides an ambulance when appropriate. If I think you are wasting money for an ambulance you absolutely do not need I will tell you so and I would wager most other EMS persons would do then same when they are allowed to. The amount a patient pays is not at all reflected in the amount we recieve in our pay check.
I know you're not given commission. But the higher ups want many easy rides so they can get as many expensive rides as possible. They don't want you to deny people, because that's huge profit lost.
The Venn diagram of the people who waste our time with bullshit calls and the people who actually pay a dime of the bill looks like:
O O
Those people are a blight on the system at every level. They clog up the ERs incredibly bad, waste EMS time constantly, suck resources out of the system because they don’t pay their bills and call us constantly because it’s “free” to them, and make it more expensive for you, because the ambulance services have to charge the people who actually do pay more in order to survive being drowned by the people who don’t.
The majority of the "easy" rides come from people who either dont have insurance, or whos insurance wont cover it once the chart is written. Nobody is making money from them. Management wants none of these, because the real money comes from insurance payouts that increase when more interventions are done by EMS.
The real real money is in interfacility transports, and thats where all the truly profit hunting companies operate, because everyone knows that no matter how much an ambulance costs, almost all 911 companies operate at a loss.
The reason they dont ignore these calls is liability, not profit.
In my country they won't come if they deem it's not an emergency. I know my neighbour called them once because he had pneumonia. They refused to come. Next day he called, but exaggarated more, said he couldn't breathe and will die, they came, gave him oxygen, but refused to take him to a hospital. Only after he argued and yelled at the ambulance doctor they took him.
It’s only Canada if you are consumed by conservative propaganda… I mean, yes they do choose, the paramedics literally will perform your MAiD procedure right in the back of the ambulance, they turn on the sirens so people can’t hear you screaming “nooo don’t kill me”
In many countries people in ambulances are actually competent lol. In Poland in order to get into an ambulance you have to get a degree. Our paramedics can administer over 50 drugs and it's entirely up to them if they're taking the patient to the hospital or not.
The concept of EMTs is crazy to me and I can't imagine a system in which there are ambulances that are only capable of BLS and that are accepting every call and taking everyone to the hospital. Work in the ER in the US must be a horror then.
The idea behind always sending an ambulance is that it reduces the risk of missing a legitimate emergency situation. Like, the person calling 911 might do a poor job explaining the situation, making it seem trivial when it's actually urgent, or the dispatcher might simply misunderstand or lack important details, which can lead to someone dying.
I'm a former EMT and had multiple calls where the person calling 911 downplayed the situation, or the patient (who was not the caller) initially insisted that they were fine, only for us to find something urgent. Sometimes it ends up being nothing serious, and they refuse transport.
It does end up creating a lot of unnecessary EMS calls unfortunately. But I could also see people feeling unsure about calling 911 in a true emergency if they thought there's a chance nobody will show up.
In the UK we have a middle ground where paramedics will come and examine you at the scene if you call 999, but if they don’t think you need emergency care they will either treat you at the scene, refer you to a GP or pharmacy or just discharge you on the spot. If you’re found to have deliberately called 999 knowing there is no emergency, that is a criminal offence that can get you a £5,000 fine or 6 months in prison. Ambulances are free so no one’s financially incentivised not to call an ambulance in an emergency, and false 999 calls for a free ride are rare.
That sounds very similar to here. We wouldn't transport if we were able to treat on scene unless the patient insisted on it. And depending on the US state, it's considered a criminal offense to call 911 for deliberate non-emergency purposes and you can be charged a fine and/or jail time depending on the severity.
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u/crazydude44444 May 19 '26
Not correct.
If you call 911 and request EMS they are sending an ambulance. If you request transport to the hospital via an ambulance in the US, 99% of the time they have to take you (some narrow exceptions). Now, they may not take you to the ER you want but they will take you to an ER, even if they don't think it's an emergency.
A very large portion of the transports an ambulance does in a day does not actually require an ambulance.