# Doubling ambulance fee adds insult to patients' injuries



## MariaCatEMT (Aug 11, 2006)

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Doubling ambulance fee adds insult to patients' injuries

The Portage City Council doubled ambulance fees, but not for the reason you might think.

The extra money is not going to support the ambulance service, or even the Portage Fire Department, which runs the ambulance service. Instead, all of the increase is going into the city's general fund.

That runs contrary to the principle that fees should have some connection to the service that generates the money.

Nearly a dozen firefighters attended last week's City Council meeting, expecting that 25 percent of the ambulance fees would be put into a special account for the fire department to use for improvements to its emergency medical service.

Read more here...
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## FFEMT1764 (Aug 11, 2006)

Well the thing is that most government run EMS services deposit the collections from billing into their general fund...thats what happens here, and we all know that we are continusly supporting the jail with our revenue, but hey if we collect 1.5 million and see 350,000 in our EMS budget that still equals out to a pretty nice raise.


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## emtI (Aug 11, 2006)

That's how we do it here, too.  The money goes into the general fund.  But considering that our billing only generates about half of our annual operating expenses, and the city subsidizes the rest, we really don't have a choice.  If we had to operate solely off of what we generated, we'd either be driving a  25 year old ambulance and not be able to pay our staff, or not operate at all.

Our rates are less than the national average, so I'm told, and we still only collect about 50-55% of what we bill through insurance, etc.  that's not counting those w/o insurance, who never pay their bill.

I'd be curious to know what their rates are.


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