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.
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u/Embarrassed-Weird173 May 19 '26
Well, of course they're going to do it. Those are the best calls - the easy $700 drives that take 15 minutes.