The only reason the city is doing this is because these ambulance contractors are sharks.
Ambulatory service is one of those things that should be ran by the city/state and not by some random private company. A private company in this case can only serve to make it much more expensive for the city and people needing emergency services while providing bad service and understaffing and underpaying their staff all at once. You'll get paramedics being paid $15/hr that charge $1500 for 10 minute ambulance ride where the contracting company pockets nearly everything.
I get it, cities don't like taxing people for ambulances, so that's why they try and contract it away to avoid that tax line item or savings needed to ultimately buy new medical equipment. That, however, kills people.
It's absurd that we can find it in our budgets to pay for fireman and police but for some reason anything related to medicine needs to be privately contracted out.
Everything was basically either payed for by donations from a local business or funded by fundraising. Primarily because the county didn't want to have a tax to run the system properly. Same thing happened with my hometown's fire department. Though in that case you could effectively buy fire insurance from the county (and of course, some people decided not to buy that insurance).
Both are a bad way to run critical services, especially since my hometown was surrounded by a lot of farm and state owned land where lightning strikes causing a fire wasn't uncommon. I don't have a big issue with the volunteer portion of it, it was a small town which the county would otherwise not want to service. But the funding portion was just bad. Fire, famously, spreads. And giving people the ability to opt out is dumb because it makes a big problem if a fire starts on their property and spreads to someone else's.
Seattle spends nearly $400 million a year on the SPD, which is about 25% of their discretionary budget.
Turns out the police noticed and lobbied the next government into removing the department and getting all the money back for regular law enforcement.
The insurance is optional. If you don't want to pay the four dollars each month, you don't have to, but it's so cheap and easy why wouldn't you for the peace of mind it offers.
The woman died.
Even more importantly, no one made a follow-up to ensure she safely reached a hospital.
This is disgusting. And people say the US healthcare is "best of the world ".
No. Just no.
This is insane. I am reminded of “we don’t capture Police officer involved shooting so there is no national record”
Every management book written in America has something like “if you don’t measure it you can’t manage it”
What they don’t mention is “if you don’t want to chnage it, don’t measure it”
It's also likely that she ended up in this position because she couldn't afford proper treatment of her RA, resulting in it destroying her knees. I also have RA, diagnosed 3 years ago and my treatment costs $15,000 per month. Losing my job and/or having insurance that won't cover it is a terror that knaws at the back of my mind because without the treatment I'll start suffering debilitating symptoms in 3-6 months.
We spend the most on healthcare vs any other nation while getting results comparable to nations like Cuba (not hyperbole. Go look up infant mortality of Cuba vs US). I mean, no joke, the main thing that harms Cuban healthcare is the US embargo limiting medicine and medical supplies from going in.
It's truly embarrassing.
Basic functions of society should never be run by 'for profit' standards. Do you want a 'for profit' fire department, medical care system, or law enforcement systems? These are core support services for an orderly society.
Citizens that rely upon these services in their time of need often have no other recourse.
Also possibly a cynical take but I wonder if her son being there and calling the ambulance on her behalf would have resulted in the situation being taken more seriously.
> She called 911 for an ambulance. She got a nightmare instead
As far as I'm concerned the second one is the title because (regardless of any technicalities such as metadata) that's how it's being presented to me when I visit.