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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.
This. In 1987 Congress socialized healthcare. Every plan since then, including Obamacare, has just been trying to pay for that decision.
I remember visiting the hospital long ago and seeing the ER crammed full of poor people who went there for every earache and headache because they wouldn't be turned away and wouldn't have to pay. I remember also seeing healthcare costs inflate far faster than the rate of inflation for other goods and services: the ten dollar aspirins, the absurd cost of a hospital room, all going to pay for the poor who abused the free ER. That was wealth redistribution plain and simple, taking from those who could pay to give to those who could not and clogged up the system with trivial complaints. Obamacare was an attempt to get that clog out of the ER and into primary care physicians' clinics, but it imposed other problems like breaking the financial back of the middle class, especially the vast numbers of young men who never see a doctor and who therefore were essential to the risk pools because they had the most to lose financially.
Healthcare is already socialized. Fixing it will mean repealing the free ER coverage and, hopefully, removing the parasitic middleman of the health care insurer. When transactions are between a doctor and patient and nobody else, costs will go down.
Nope. Never happened. Been GOP mantra for a while, "Oh, healthcare is already free! Everyone has the right to go to the ER and not pay!" they claim.
And it's not true.
If you go to the ER, you have the right to be treated regardless of whether you can pay the bill. That's it. That's not the same thing. All it means is that the hospital can't insist you have insurance, or run a credit check on you, before treatment.
If you don't have the money on you, they have the right to send you a bill. And you absolutely will owe the money on that bill. If you try to avoid paying, you will spend the rest of your life being hounded by debt collectors, you'll be subject to liens and wage garnishments. Your credit rating will be ruined.
Are hospitals having problems because of that policy? Why, yes! It costs money to go after people who can't pay, and obviously there are classes of people who'll never be able to pay, from the occasional illegal immigrant or other underclass member to, well, to name the obvious class of people who turn up at an ER and then can't pay, dead people.
The fix for that, BTW, is universal healthcare. Real universal healthcare. Make sure everyone who turns up at the ER has paid, through taxes or premiums, for the full costs of treatment ahead of time.
But here's a question: in the current world, what's the alternative?
If you turn up at the ER, and don't have documentation with you that can be linked to either a bank account or a valid insurance policy, should you be kicked out of the hospital? Should they leave you to die? Should they delay administering any treatment until you're able to identify yourself and your intended form of payment?
Because for all your huffing and puffing about deadbeats and "sheer stupidity", that's what this boils down to. Love the status quo as much as you like, but what you're proposing is death by bureaucrat.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, but you pay 55% income tax and 21% sales tax. The ambulances still have to run, still cost (more expensive) gas. So basically any foreigner that pays $150 is subsidized by you.
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