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Someone once said an ambulance isn’t your personal taxi to the hospital, like my brother in fuck what do you think it is then?
At the risk of getting myself a rain of downvotes here:
An ambulance is an expensive and somewhat rare mini-ER on wheels that’s designed to help a small team of expensive and somewhat rare specialists stabilize a dangerous condition on a patient until it reaches a hospital. Since it is important to keep those somewhat rare vehicles and teams in reserve for when they are suddenly urgently needed, you really shouldn’t use one as a taxi to the hospital if whatever your condition is doesn’t call for that.
(Asking enormous sums of money of the patient for the privilege is IMHO still wrong. The decision to use an ambulance or not should not be based on whether you can can easily part with a couple thousand dollars.)
So triage the issue remotely and send the appropriate response.
Stubbed toe? Reimburse a ride share.
Fractured arm? EMT in a lower cost van.
Urgent trauma? Full rig and EMT crew.
In more civilized countries, they would charge you for abuse if you call an ambulance when you don’t need it. But even the fine is less than this number.
Exactly, its your personal free ride. Not like a taxi at all.
Yep. It’s free, it’s faster, and it has in-vehicle catering!
My mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago. She later got a bill for $2800 although medicare paid for some of that. Turns out the hospital she went to had its own associated ambulance service which wasn’t the ambulance service that gave her the ride. She later got a second bill from the hospital’s ambulance service, also for $2800, even though they hadn’t even given her the ride (medicare naturally enough did not pay for any of this bill). My mom was going to pay this second bill because I guess her generation just pays every fucking bill that shows up in the mail no matter what, but I put my foot down and insisted that she didn’t. I had a lot of fun calling them up and yelling at them about this bullshit. They refused to retract the bill and sent it a few more times, but eventually they gave up and didn’t send it to collections.
A fun side note to this story is that the hospital system in question became in danger of bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. A vulture capitalist firm noticed that the value of just the hospital system’s real estate holdings was a lot more than the sale price, so they purchased it and ran up a ton more debt paying themselves more than a billion dollars in bonuses. Then they spun off the real estate as a separate entity to which the hospitals started paying rent, which increased their operating deficit and debt still further. Eventually the hospitals declared bankruptcy and were closed down, leaving an entire city (of poor black people, natch) without any hospitals at all. Capitalism is just so awesome.
That’s amazing.
vulture capitalist
I’m going to reuse this
It’s a whole category, not a new term.
You should. Economists and other English speakers have been using it since at least 2008.
Gets out of the hospital, goes to a new school in this strange new place, gets shot, winds up back in the same hospital
Groundhog Day 2 is a bit grittier than the original.
This comic is such bullshit.
Ambulances are $3k, minimum. If you need helivac you’re look at $20-30k.
Due to reasons I took an ambulance ride. For one and a half miles. From one hospital to another. They billed my insurance $6K
And both of those EMTs probably have a second job.
I had a seizure in a gas station. When I regained consciousness in the back of an ambulance I told them I asked them not to take me anywhere and to let me go on my way because I couldn’t afford the ride. The look on their faces told me a lot about how shitty our country is. They knew I was refusing medical attention I probably needed because I couldn’t afford for them to take me to a hospital I couldn’t afford treatment at, even with health insurance.
$1,400? That’s only a small portion of a US ambulance ride. I’ve seen over $6k.
That’s the VIP one where they offer things life a bed, vehicle suspension, paramedics.
My dad used an ambulance about a year and a half ago. It was 3 blocks from his house to the hospital, and they still billed around $4k.
When I lived in the States back in '04, I took a 0.25 mile ambulance ride with no medical services provided. They didn’t even take my blood pressure. I was charged almost $7500 and paid nearly $700 after insurance. That’s about… $1400 in 2026 USD!
Yeah, but in the comic the bill is 1400 before insurance covers anything. Those aren’t 2026 prices, those are 2001 prices.
Japan was mentioned so my brain kept trying to do right to left
Didn’t factor in the hospital bill, the doctor bill, the nursing staff bill, the ems bill, the er doc bill, or the overnight fees… and then there’ll still be more and all separate.
The paperwork bill for generating all the paperwork. The admin bill, to review the paperwork. The convenience surcharge, for the cost of generating paperwork.
I’m pretty sure you replying to me has added more to my significant medical bills. Somewhere in this stack I think it has a “didn’t fake an ambulance, +$”
And they still probably expect tip too those morons.
Thankfully no tip line on those bills, but zero consolidation does make it hard to set up payments and know everything is taken care of… if that’s even possible.
That’s so scary not knowing whether a debt has been paid off properly or not.
While I appreciate my Japanese healthcare (I find it a bit better than Canada’s), it’s kinda weird not knowing the ballpark amount I’m going to pay BEFORE seeing the doctor. I get a bill at the end of my visit. They have an itemized list of things they did. Each item is given “points,” and they’re converted into yen at the end. I’m not even sure what each point amounts to how many yen (although, that’s purely on me, the answer is probably a duckduckgo search away). I don’t like the feeling that I might end up with a surprisingly expensive bill.
Whoa, I heard that in the US you have to pay for an ambulance, but $1,400? And this is with insurance?
There’s a reason why people often opt for an Uber or just drive themselves to the hospital.
I made the mistake of calling for an ambulance once, and that’s the day I learned that they are owned by private companies in the US. I couldn’t afford the bill, so I had to put up with seven years of bad credit before the charge finally disappeared off my record and I was allowed to own a credit card and buy a vehicle without paying for it in full with cash.
On the bright side, weed is legal and abundant. And unlike in Amsterdam, you don’t even have to smoke it because it comes in so many different forms! So instead of going to the doctor, I just drink and vape to my health.
God I hate living in this country.
$1400 is unrealistically cheap to the point where I’m pretty sure it’s part of the punch line here
there are dumb dumbs in your country that want to replace your system with this one for efficiency or some shit
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That’s without insurance, with insurance it depends. You can have a high deductible and pay that much, but a good plan if it’s necessary medically then it should be 0 to a 100 ish payment but sometimes you’ll have co-payment so it’s still like couple hundred.
Only $1400 for an ambulance ride? Must be the co-pay on insurance. My last ambulance ride cost me ~$5000 and that was in 2008.
I’d totally watch a comedy/slice of life/horror anime about a Japanese person having to go live in America. If for no other reason than to see a whole anime where most of the cast are Joseph Joestar level English speakers.
Lol, what a steal. Or maybe this is the 90ies
What kind of healthcare system do they have in Japan? I actually have no idea.
It’s both heavily subsidised by the government and heavily regulated to ensure access to quality care.
For an otherwise healthy adult, you’d pay ~30% of the cost. BUT there are laws that ensure privately-run healthcare facilities can only charge the same amount as publicly-run ones. So even at full cost, these prices are very low compared to the US.
There are also caps on how much someone will spend in a month, so even long-lasting illnesses/disabilities won’t bankrupt you.
A normal one. Not perfect, but not a bizarre torture device for anyone not deliriously wealthy
I’ve never seen a better PSA to look both ways before crossing the road
This would actually be a pretty good idea.
