Trapped Girls Call For Help On Facebook

definate writes "Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of 'Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!'. Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities."

Comments

Re:Age requirement for Facebook

[clone53421]

No, you just have to say you are.

You'd be surprised how useful Facebook is.

[mckinnsb]

Just yesterday I was stranded after a wedding (it was a good wedding), without a car or cell phone. Let's just say it was a hell of a time. Anyway, long story short, I wake up one morning in a hotel room without any contact information and I have to let my family know where I am - except they all just got a new iPhone, have changed their number, and I have yet to remember it.

Guess where one of those phone numbers was? Facebook. I found myself a public terminal in the hotel lobby and got all the information I needed to be reuinted with my car, phone, and the road.

It is actually quite useful.

Re:000, 999 and 111 make perfect sense

[sunderland56]

American exchanges use *11 as special codes.

• 411 is directory assistance
• 611 is for customer service
• 711 is the deaf-to-speech TDD service
• 911 is the emergency number

In many places another number (generally 311 or 711) is used as a non-emergency information service.

Re:I can believe it

[TechyImmigrant]

SMS uses messages on management connections that have stronger, more redundant error correction than the voice bearers. This is why in marginal signal situations, you can text but not talk.

The history of 911

[westlake]

Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.

In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.

"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911

The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.

Re:Shame on you Facebook!

[nolife]

I thought the emergency number was "0118 999 881 999 119 7253"

That's nothing. Just like this post.

[MrCrassic]

---

When the hell do you PAY for an ambulance ?

[Space cowboy]

Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford an emergency service ?

I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential services.

I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there :)

I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.

For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.

There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...

Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you

Re:When the hell do you PAY for an ambulance ?

[shermo]

It makes sense from an entirely selfish point of view also.

Some amazingly large percentage of all bankruptcies in the US are caused by inability to pay for medical bills. That cost gets passed on to the population. It seems reasonable that this happens in a less efficient method than if medical costs were paid for up front by the population.

Also, I don't want to get mugged by some guy who lost his house to pay for his sister's life saving kidney replacement.

A functioning society that look after its members is better for all members of the society.

Re:Shame on you Facebook!

[squiggly12]

Yes, here is a place in Iowa that has done this.
http://www.switched.com/tag/911+text+messages/

Me too

[Space cowboy]

Funnily enough, I was in a motorbike accident myself before I came over to the USA. Nowhere near as bad as your own (I was very lucky) but I was in hospital for a couple of days, rode there in the ambulance, had police and fire trucks called out to the scene etc. There was no charge, and it didn't cross my mind that there would be...

Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're not trying to make a profit. Any private institution has to run all the same risks, spend all the same money, and also make a return on the investment. Normally I'm fully behind this as a great motivator for the company concerned, but when the easy option is to simply screw the "customer" in order to turn a profit, I'm not so sure.

In any event, the point of my post wasn't about people like you and I, with good medical insurance coverage. It was because I don't believe *anyone* should be concerned about medical coverage, even if that costs me something. That, I think, is a big cultural divide between the US and the UK on this matter, not just the public/private debate.

My fiancee is in fact more-qualified than I, she has a JD/MBA. However, she is still paying off student debts (another thing I didn't have to worry about in the UK, but that's another rant altogether :) and has only got a position as a long-term contractor; she would have had to pay her own medical insurance without any company aid, which (even with her income) is simply ridiculously expensive. If a well-educated well-to-do person can't afford medical insurance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark...

As far as the argument that you don't trust the government because of its past performance, it seems you do trust an insurance company, despite all evidence to the contrary of how they behave when you need them to pay up. Anyone who's been involved in a car accident would probably attest that (a) they screw you if they can, and (b) they screw you later by increasing your premiums, even if they somehow didn't manage to screw you via (a).

On top of that, Medical insurance agencies have come up with (c), a new evil: "recission". This is where they go back through your file looking for any possible (no matter how tenuous) excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance (even after payment has been initially made), leaving you with the huge bill that you might even have thought was already paid, and no possibility of getting any medical insurance in the future. I read of a case where a fall by the pregnant mother cancelled a policy by the adult daughter when the daughter developed vision problems at age 27.

I'm sorry, but that just sucks. Really. Really. Really sucks.

Simon

Re:Me too

[demonlapin]

Well...

Recission should simply be made criminal except when actual fraud was perpetrated upon the insurance company. But it's rare, and so it's not really the problem.

Perhaps I can give you a bit more insight into how the system works from a slightly more insider perspective: insurance in the US is a complete dog's breakfast because there are 50 different state regulatory agencies telling companies what to do. My state places very few requirements on what the companies must cover, and premiums are fairly low - I can join the "high-risk pool" run by the state, with immediate coverage and no preexisting conditions disallowed, for $450/mo (which has a $1000 medical deductible and $250 pharmacy deductible; rates go down to $170/mo for $10000/$1000). This isn't cheap, but it's affordable for anyone who doesn't qualify for Medicaid, which is the state-provided coverage for the poor. There are all sorts of things that state insurance boards can do to run up the cost, though, like requiring that birth control pills be covered, or having "community rating" in which everyone in an area generally pays the same amount regardless of preexisting conditions, or "shall issue" in which they can't turn you down. (The combination of the last two works to make costs much, much higher.)

So when we say we don't trust our government, there's more than one government at work. State governments generally regard Federal money as a delightful windfall to be used and abused as long as it's there, so they don't work to keep costs down. Insurance companies may try to screw you, but at least you can go to another one. If you have group health insurance via your employer, you can even get your preexistings covered if your employer switches plans.

Medicaid alone goes a long way to explaining American indifference to the uninsured. The presence of programs that exist solely to provide for the poor gives the very clear impression (whether or not it is correct) that someone who doesn't have insurance isn't poor, but has chosen not to buy insurance. And that makes people a lot less sympathetic - why worry about the 25-year-old guy who'd rather have a fancy car than health insurance? Furthermore, it presents a rather immediate solution to the problem of the uninsured - provide it for everyone in the state who wants it, and set up a sliding scale of payments required based on income. Medicaid is a sufficiently unpleasant coverage to have that people will happily pay to have something better.

And this gets right to the heart of it. Medicaid and Medicare were sold to our parents and grandparents as a way to provide coverage for everyone. Given that they've screwed that up, why is chucking the whole system (which, on balance, works pretty well for the vast majority of people) and starting all over the best way to do it? The issue has been complicated by the fact that quite a few people in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party have all but openly acknowledged that any "public option" would be a first step toward a fully socialized health care system (which nearly always ends up sounding just like Canada's system, as if we can't do better than that). It doesn't take too many tales of patients waiting a few months for a hip replacement, or not being able to get a doctor's appointment when away from home, or not being able to see the doctor they want, for the relatively well-to-do elderly to kill something off (and there is no voting bloc like the over-65s - they are politically savvy, they are wealthier than any other group, and they always have free time to go vote).

Oh, and to answer something you mentioned earlier - EMS that has a contract for an area can't refuse to pick you up, but they can send you a bill afterward, and it's extremely common for the Coast Guard and other rescue agencies to send bills to people who do dumb stuff.