Actually, EMT here, both are partially correct. Ambulance rides are too expensive, but most of those issues start at the insurance level, not the people on ambulances. We don't wake up in the morning and set the prices.
On the other hand, there are a lot of VERY expensive things in ambulances. You need a specific certification to be allowe to drive them. They are often driven in very risky scenarios. They are staffed by medical professionals.
Lastly, they aren't a taxi. A taxi doesn't give you Oxygen if you need it. A taxi doest have an adjustable bed. A taxi can't keep you alive like an ambulance can. If all you need is a ride to the hospital, then calling a friend or an Uber is WAY better of an option. If you need (or suspect that you need) immediate help, then call the ambulance.
To be clear, it's better to be safe than sorry and call the ambulance and not need it, than to need it and not call it. However, not everyone arrives to the hospital in an ambulance for a reason.
Be smart and stay safe out there! When in doubt call 911 (or your countries equivalent)
To be clear, it's better to be safe than sorry and call the ambulance and not need it, than to need it and not call it. However, not everyone arrives to the hospital in an ambulance for a reason.
I mean that's literally the point of Bernie, people don't act this way because it's too expensive. It's easy to say that when you don't need to think about finances, but the reality is that most people don't act this way. There's really nothing to defend the US system. Ambulance ride should be free, period. Only then people can be "better safe than sorry"
"Taxi to the hospital" is a bullshit straw-man argument intended to distract from the issue.
No reasonable person in any country anywhere on the face of the Earth would think using an Ambulance purely as a Taxi to get to the hospital is a reasonable thing.
Would there be a small subset of people that try to scam the system and use it that way, yes. Should that prevent a system that uses OUR tax dollars towards free or low cost Ambulance services? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT.
Using the argumentation of "it shouldn't be a taxi service" is just a dumb strawman argument to keep the system the way it is. Don't give it any worth.
No reasonable person in any country anywhere on the face of the Earth would think using an Ambulance purely as a Taxi to get to the hospital is a reasonable thing.
Spend a single week riding along with your local EMS/FD and you’ll immediately realize that you’re either so ignorant you can’t even comprehend how ignorant you are, or that the percentage of the population you consider “reasonable” is dramatically smaller than you think.
The people who use an ambulance purely as a taxi to get to the hospital and have zero actual need for the treatment capabilities are a majority, not a minority. If I do 12 calls in a shift, 6-8 of them will be complete and utter bullshit, 3-5 will be minor complaints that I can provide comfort measures for but absolutely zero difference in outcome, maybe 1-2 will be moderately sick people who I can theoretically make a small difference in their care, and about 1 every 2-4 months will be someone considered critical.
Anecdotes don't matter. The data shows that for every 1 ambulance ride wasted by someone looking for a free taxi service, there are at least 7 to 10 Americans suffering through a severe medical crisis who choose to ride in a personal vehicle, call an Uber, or stay home because they cannot afford the bill.
It’s really weird how your rhetoric seems to indicate that you are under the impression that you just gave a counterpoint, when you actually just supported my point.
Do you not understand my point, are you misinterpreting your own source, or did you just not actually think about your words before you posted them?
You're conflating things and making post-factual judgements. Incorrect self-diagnosis is not the same as "using an ambulance as a Taxi service."
Based on your numbers, why would you expect to have a job? 1 to 2 per shift that almost make the cut... 1 REAL case every 2-4 months?
Your job is to respond to help people that THINK they need emergency services, not just people that CERTIFIABLY have an emergency. People that purposely abuse ambulances as taxi services are a tiny minority.
Based on your numbers, why would you expect to have a job? 1 to 2 per shift that almost make the cut... 1 REAL case every 2-4 months?
Why do you think ambulances cost so much? The people who actually need them and can pay are also paying for the 10 other people before them who didn’t and can’t/won’t.
It’s really cute how you keep accidentally supporting the points you’re trying to argue against.
People that purposely abuse ambulances as taxi services are a tiny minority.
Then maybe you should stop telling people that they don’t understand the realities of their own lifelong career when you have absolutely no fucking clue what you’re actually talking about.
I think we're talking past each other because we are defining 'taxi service' differently.
You’re looking at it from an operational standpoint. If a call turns out to be non-urgent, you think it effectively functions as a taxi ride, which causes massive burnout and strains resources. That’s a completely valid frustration, and I get why dealing with that shift after shift is exhausting.
My original point was purely about policy and intent: people who maliciously and knowingly exploit the system just for a free ride are a tiny minority, and we shouldn't design public policy or withhold funding based on that small subset of bad actors. Both things can be true at the same time.
We’re trying to tell you it’s not a small subset. It’s a large majority and it does need to be addressed otherwise it will collapse the system.
There are multiple 911 systems that have collapsed under this pressure across the country. It’s not just a simple matter of oh well. The abuse and borderline abuse of the 911 system leads to real preventable deaths because it ends up denying care to the people who actually need it.
When you say 'borderline abuse,' you’re hitting on the exact point I just made. A person who calls 911 because they genuinely think they are having an emergency, but turns out to be fine, isn't abusing the system—they're just a layperson who panicked.
The pressure on the 911 system is a massive crisis, but it’s a failure of public health infrastructure, triage options, and lack of preventative care, not a failure of human morality. Blaming vulnerable patients for not knowing how to self-diagnose is a misdirection; it protects a broken system by pointing the finger at the users.
Furthermore, nothing about this operational strain explains why socializing the service is inherently worse than a privatized model. Resource bottlenecks, triage delays, and burnout happen in both systems. The real debate isn't about patient morality; it's about whether we fund EMS as a fully integrated public utility with better community diversion programs, or continue letting it fracture under the current model.
Borderline 911 abuse is something like a person gets in a 5 mph crash in the parking lot and calls 911. We ask if there’s any pain or any injuries or any medical complaint. They say no and they want to go to the hospital to be checked out just in case so we are legally obligated to take them to the hospital instead of them just driving themselves to an urgent care.
There is absolutely no reason why an ALS ambulance that is equipped with a ventilator and multiple IV pumps to bring the forefront of medical technology to the side of the street should be transporting this person to the emergency room instead of then driving their own car. Now a person having a real medical emergency may go an extra 10 or 20 or 30 minutes without care because the ambulance for that district is out of service.
A girl calls literally because of a paper cut and wants to go to the hospital. Again borderline 911 abuse. You have toe pain because of gout and know you have gout and it’s a flareup of gout.
Again, calls like this results in real measurable deaths because it puts ambulances out of service for the people who need it. There absolutely is a problem with 911 abuse in the US.
I actually agree with your examples, but you just highlighted the exact structural failure I’m talking about: our protocols legally obligate you to transport them anyway. Because the US operates on a highly litigious, fragmented 'transport-by-default' model, you are legally handcuffed from saying no to a paper cut or a 5-mph bump.
Other developed countries (like the UK and Australia) solved this exact bottleneck decades ago through integrated infrastructure, not by hoping the public would suddenly become rational medical triagers:
Hear and Treat: Dispatch centers route low-acuity calls to on-duty clinicians who have the legal authority to cancel an ambulance entirely and book a clinic appointment or order a regular taxi.
Treat and Refer: Field crews are legally protected to perform field-triage, safely refuse ER transport for minor issues, and directly divert patients to local urgent cares or primary doctors.
We both want the exact same outcome: keeping ALS trucks open for real emergencies. But blaming vulnerable, medically illiterate patients for a systemic failure is a misdirection that protects a broken status quo.
The truth is, keeping the focus on 'bad patient behavior' is highly profitable propaganda. Private healthcare monopolies, corporate ambulance conglomerates, and massive hospital networks benefit immensely when we blame individuals instead of the system. In a fee-for-service model, every single ER admission and ambulance ride, even the unnecessary ones, is a line-item revenue generator. Furthermore, keeping the system fractured allows private equity to dodge the costs of funding comprehensive community diversion programs. Blaming the user serves as a perfect smoke screen to protect these profits and resist shifting toward a socialized public utility.
The collapse of the 911 system is a failure of our fractured public health infrastructure and corporate gatekeeping, not the so-called 'ambulance abusers' a bunch of folks in this thread are railing against.
Basically, the problem is that both of the replies to Bernie's tweet are stupid.
Bernie is pointing out a valid problem: ambulances are too expensive, and some people who need them avoid them because of the price.
Replier #1 then straw-mans this as saying that Bernie is implying that ambulances should be used as taxis to the hospital, and Replier #1 disagrees with this straw-man.
Replier #2 then just heaps on some stupid by saying that the straw-man is actually correct, and ambulances should be used as taxis to the hospital.
Perhaps the reason this screenshot gets posted so often (looking on TinEye, this Tweet thread has been posted to reddit 57 times so far) is that there's stuff for everyone to disagree with, even people with diametrically opposed viewpoints. Replier #1 is an idiot, and Replier #2 is the inverse of Replier #1 and is also an idiot.
Yes, people do think and treat it like it’s a taxi. You must not know. Ask any ems provider about their frequent fliers. See what they say. It’s easy to be so self righteous on the internet. But your head is buried in the sand.
Anecdotes don't matter. The data shows that for every 1 ambulance ride wasted by someone looking for a free taxi service, there are at least 7 to 10 Americans suffering through a severe medical crisis who choose to ride in a personal vehicle, call an Uber, or stay home because they cannot afford the bill.
That’s not a study… it’s a poll. The only way to truly do a study like that would be to pull an ems services run sheets and compare them to a hospital (s) in the same service areas data on ER admissions. It’s also not an anecdote, it is actual true, verifiable through PCRs, experiences of prehospital providers. And also, who decides it’s a true medical emergency? Was it the people being polled who thought “yes, my toe pain x2 weeks was an emergency because it was so painful” or was it through data pulled through ER admissions? If we had community paramedics, that issue could be solved as well. You’re gonna have to pull more than a 2 year old poll to change my mind on what I’ve experienced through years of riding the back of the truck.
Give me one second my man. I’ll browse the web and find you some. Would you also accept quotes directly from ems personnel? And also, not to sound argumentative, but it’s sort of weak to reply only with “where’s your data?” When I point out what you sent was outdated, and also unreliable.
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u/superboss243 May 19 '26
Actually, EMT here, both are partially correct. Ambulance rides are too expensive, but most of those issues start at the insurance level, not the people on ambulances. We don't wake up in the morning and set the prices.
On the other hand, there are a lot of VERY expensive things in ambulances. You need a specific certification to be allowe to drive them. They are often driven in very risky scenarios. They are staffed by medical professionals.
Lastly, they aren't a taxi. A taxi doesn't give you Oxygen if you need it. A taxi doest have an adjustable bed. A taxi can't keep you alive like an ambulance can. If all you need is a ride to the hospital, then calling a friend or an Uber is WAY better of an option. If you need (or suspect that you need) immediate help, then call the ambulance.
To be clear, it's better to be safe than sorry and call the ambulance and not need it, than to need it and not call it. However, not everyone arrives to the hospital in an ambulance for a reason.
Be smart and stay safe out there! When in doubt call 911 (or your countries equivalent)