Wake County North Carolina offers an EMS subscription for "free" ambulance rides | Why not just collect such money as a tax and provide free ambulance rides
Some communities have area-wide ambulance/EMS services, funded by taxes. Although most of the systems will still bill insurance for costs.
Wake County, North Carolina where Raleigh is, offers a subscription to cover the costs that insurance won't cover, $60 per year.
Although one family, living in Wake County but on the border with Johnson County, got a big bill, because "no Wake County ambulances were available" ("Raleigh couple says Wake County ambulance subscription program failed them," WRAL-TV). And they were served by a Johnson County ambulance, and the subscription program didn't cover the extra cost.
Why not just raise every household's taxes by $60 /year and pay for the service that way?
Labels: emergency services, health and wellness planning, provision of public services, public health
posted by Richard Layman @ 3:35 PM&Permanent Link
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https://www.startribune.com/twin-cities-fire-paramedic-social-work-response/601217297
How Twin Cities medics are trying new responses to rising 911 calls
Falls, overdoses and mental health concerns have driven up 911 calls. St. Louis Park, Richfield, Edina and Burnsville are among the cities that are trying something different.
2/5/25
The calls came in quick succession over the course of two weeks: A man in St. Louis Park fell and dialed 911 for help getting up, again and again.
So Assistant Fire Chief Beaux Beauvais, who is also a paramedic, tried something different. He went to the man’s house, reviewed his medications and found they were likely mixing poorly and causing his dizziness.
“When our firefighters go out on 911 calls every day, they sometimes identify patients that might need extra help beyond the confines of that 911 call,” Beauvais said.
That’s why St. Louis Park will soon have a new alternative response medic dedicated to handling those types of calls, joining a growing number of cities trying to blend social work with medicine to reduce emergencies.
Fire chiefs across the Twin Cities metro area say they’ve also seen a spike in calls, some driven by drug overdoses or mental health concerns. In other places, people are aging and falling more frequently. Many fire chiefs say more patients seem to be relying on 911 for nonemergency issues that might be best handled in a doctor’s office.
“We already had an embedded social worker within the police department,” said Richfield Fire Chief Mike Dobesh, whose department is testing out a similar program. “So there was this request to see if we could do something different, something bigger.”
Fort Lauderdale seeks to collect new EMS tax. The higher the property value, the higher the tax
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/01/22/fort-lauderdale-seeks-to-collect-new-ems-tax-the-higher-the-property-value-the-higher-the-tax
https://archive.ph/XukEn
Fort Lauderdale is moving forward with plans to set up an EMS taxing district that could generate close to $55 million a year to help pay the salaries of the city’s firefighter/paramedics.
Homeowners and commercial property owners would see the Emergency Medical Services tax on their property tax bill along with a fire fee already levied by the city.
The EMS tax would come to nearly $500 for a home with a taxable value of $590,000. The higher the value of the property, the higher the tax.
"The firefighter salary is divided between the fire fee and the EMS tax,” Gollan said. “The fire fee pays for firefighting duties. Our firefighters are paramedics too. The EMS tax pays for emergency medical care.”
As fire chief, Gollan oversees a budget of more than $122 million and a staff of 523 full-time employees, including more than 450 firefighters. Their salaries and benefits alone cost $95 million.
When a Winthrop toddler stopped breathing, where were all the ambulances?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/12/05/metro/when-winthrop-toddler-stopped-breathing-where-were-all-ambulances
Feeley’s son called 911. Within minutes, town firefighters converged on Feeley’s tidy, two-story clapboard home in Winthrop and took over chest compressions and CPR on the toddler. It was immediately clear she needed the kind of advanced life support that trained paramedics could provide.
“Better step up that ambulance,” Captain Dan Flynn radioed.
But there was a problem. Action Ambulance Service, the private company that provides ambulance service to Winthrop, did not have an ambulance available to respond to the call, the dispatcher said.
“Is she breathing yet?” Feeley kept asking. “Is she breathing?”
Finally, as the minutes ticked away, and no one showed up, Fire Chief Scott Wiley gathered up Yuna, still wearing her “CoComelon” pajamas, carried her outside to his Chevy Tahoe, and drove her to Mass. General. But it was too late. A team of doctors and a chaplain soon found Feeley sitting in a private waiting room and delivered the news: Yuna was dead.
What happened the morning of Yuna’s death was the result of a broken EMS system across Massachusetts that means there isn’t always an ambulance or ambulance staff immediately available when patients critically need care, a Globe investigation found.
When one city’s ambulances are tied up, as in Yuna’s case, other towns are supposed to provide ambulances to cover for them. But there is no central or regionalized system to track the location of ambulances in real time, and no one evaluating whether the number of ambulances on the road is sufficient.
For ambulances that are in operation, chronic staffing shortages mean sometimes badly needed ambulances that are supposed to be in the field stay parked in garages, unused.
And when the ambulances are staffed, in some cases the same overworked EMTs and paramedics are sent out over and over again during long shifts that can result in serious mistakes, interviews and documents reviewed by the Globe suggest. Numerous ambulance staffers said that double and triple shifts are not uncommon. The Globe identified three deaths, including two in Winthrop, that occurred in the months immediately preceding Yuna’s death in which paramedics were subsequently investigated by the state for negligence. In at least two of those cases, exhaustion and burnout clearly played a role.
The supply of ambulances in Massachusetts is determined in part by what each local market can support. While some towns run their own EMS services, about 80 percent of the state’s licensed ambulances are operated by private companies that bid for the right to serve each town’s population.
... One way to address the problem may be through regionalization. Efforts to overhaul the state’s ambulance system have been hampered in part by a “culture of parochialism” that relies on town- and city-based services, when a growing number of states, including California, Maryland, and North Carolina, have regionalized, county-based services that are better able to track and manage limited resources, said Zavadsky, the EMS expert.
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