does anyone know of any laws protecting a private ambulance service operations?

[nightstar22]

county lets private ambulance service in. private service makes a good business doing convalescent calls, and hires more employees. the county sees this, and decides to take all the convalescent calls for themselves. private service has to lay off over half of employees. the county assures the citizens that the private company will be there to back them up if they run out of ambulances going on these calls. but of course, since the private service doesn't get calls anymore, they do not run half as many trucks, they just keep what they need.
what kind of laws are out there to protect this private service and let them keep at least some of the calls? is there anything at all that can be done about this? if possible, please give links, law numbers, etc. this is in the state of tennessee. thank you!!

 

[reaper]

Do not know about TN. A lot of counties have what is called a "certificate of need". If there is a county EMS service, they hold this cert. They then decide who can work in that county. You would need to check you local setup of how they run there.

 

[nightstar22]

just on another note, the private service does pay a yearly fee to be able to operate. they had just paid this years fee when the county decided to take back these calls that they have not done in over 3 years!

 

[AJ Hidell]

You're SOL. This has been going on for over thirty years. It's been challenged a lot of times, and unfortunately I don't recall ever hearing of the privates getting it overturned.

 

[bstone]

Capitalism. It does sometimes suck.

 

[firecoins]

This has little to do with capitalism. The local government controls the market. Most users of ambulance think the service is free. Medicare and medicaid are state and federal government programs that foot the bill and they dictate the price. This is not a free market and it certainly does not represent captitalism. I am surprised a private ambulance service can stay in business.