Cities With Uber Have Lower Rates Of Ambulance Usage (npr.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Many potential emergency room patients are too sick to drive themselves to a hospital. But an ambulance can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars without insurance. This where a popular ride-sharing app can step in, while also freeing up the ambulances for those who need them most. With demand for ambulances decreased by available Uber drivers, emergency personnel have been able reach critical patients faster while also applying necessary treatment on the way to the hospital, according to a new economic study from the University of Kansas: "Given that even a reduction of a few minutes can drastically improve survival rates for serious conditions, this could be associated with a substantial welfare improvement." The study investigated ambulance rates in 766 U.S. cities from 43 different states. Taking into account the timelines of when Uber entered each city, the researchers found that the app reduced per capita ambulance usage rates by around 7 percent.

Comments

You have to pay for using an ambulance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a third world country.

Re:Interesting.

[jellomizer]

A lot of Emergency Visits that someone would ask for Uber would be a problem that isn't life or death, but can't be put off for the next day, and such conditions may make it unsafe for someone to drive themselves.
Extreme Pain, If they are on Meds that makes it unsafe for them to drive, or physically unable to drive. The ambulance is often overkill transpiration for a lot of cases. And with people taking uber to get to the hospital, can make sure the ambulances that are on standby can be closer by to handle a real emergency.

Wow!

[nospam007]

"But an ambulance can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars without insurance. "

I'm European and I can't believe my eyes.
First, here _everybody_ is insured, even the bums living under a bridge.
Second, an ambulance ride costs around 150$ if some uninsured foreigner ordered one.

I guess you're doing it wrong.

Re:Wow!

[Solandri]

There's a company running commercials here called DealDash which advertises HDTVs for $10, laptops and tablets for $20. I was curious how they got prices that low so I investigated. It functions as an auction, kinda like eBay. Except you pay a transaction cost for every bid you make - roughly 75 cents per bid. So if a $300 TV comes up for auction and sells for $10 after 10 bid cycles, the winner will have paid $10 + 10*$0.75 = $17.50 for it. Sounds great, right?

But if you look at the total cost to society, if 50 people made a grand total of 10 bids each on it trying to win that TV, the total cost to all of them to purchase that TV is actually $10 + 50*10*$0.75 = $385. And the company makes a tidy $85 profit even though the winner only paid $17.50 for a $300 TV.

That's what you have to remember when you socialize costs. The price the individual user pays is only a fraction of the actual cost. The rest is distributed over society, paid for with your taxes. So the cost of your ambulance ride is actually $150 + whatever general tax revenue is needed to fund the system. (The price the uninsured foreigner pays is probably the marginal cost - most of the fixed costs like purchasing the ambulance has already been paid for by your citizens, and the foreigner is only paying for a few minutes of the EMT's time and equipment depreciation, and the gas.)

This is why the cost to operate an ICE vehicle isn't just the gas you buy put into it. It's the cost of the gas + the cost of the pollution caused by the emissions. Likewise, it's why EVs aren't zero emissions. All they do is displace the emissions to the power plant which generates the electricity they use. Which means if your electricity is mostly generated by coal, the overall EV efficiency (after factoring in generation, transmission, and charging losses) is about the same as for a gasoline vehicle.

You have to look at the total cost of something to all of society, not just to the individual user or in an individual instance. You can criticize the U.S. for having 2x the health care costs of the OECD average. But criticizing it on the basis of a single ambulance ride cost to the end-user is naive.

Re:Interesting.

[PsychoSlashDot]

We have Socialized medicine in the United States, We buy insurance. where we pay for everyone on that companies healthcare.

You don't, really.

See, with socialized health care, there isn't a company involved. There's a government-run health organization which exists to serve people, not to make a profit. How you pay for it isn't key. How the services are delivered is.

I know there's a hypothetical where it's asked, "well, what if I want to pay more for service which is even better" and it's not a horrible question, but it presupposes that the baseline health-care is sub-par, which is - in most cases - not the case. Yes, here in Canada we've had periods where emergency-room wait times have been excessive, but with triage, true emergencies are handled immediately while "I've got a cough" is back-burnered. As it should be. And yes, there are occasions where some specific procedures are back-logged, and patients are even sometimes shuttled to our nearby American neighbors because they needed to be. But by and large, the vast, vast, majority of us are cared-for properly, promptly, efficiently, and... with disregard for the depth of our pockets.

Re:Interesting.

[Applehu Akbar]

Add to these the people who have just had a medical procedure that they have been instructed not to drive themselves home from. If you have no second driver in the family and you live in a place where taxi service is sparse and expensive, you will tend to fudge on the instructions and drive anyway. Ridesharing can improve public safety here too.