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In my state the ambulance is free
It should be free everywhere, I’m just saying that it’s not always a charge. It literally depends on your state? city?
I’d totally watch a comedy/slice of life/horror anime about a Japanese person having to go live in America. If for no other reason than to see a whole anime where most of the cast are Joseph Joestar level English speakers.
Lol, what a steal. Or maybe this is the 90ies
$1400? Damn I hope I get that lucky if ever need an ambulance ride.
The last ambulance ride I took was $5,000 (US); that was after the insurance write down. Distance was about 5 miles and no “special treatment” other than a back board.
Are y’all great yet? Asking for a friend.
We passed great a helluva long time ago.
This comic is such bullshit.
Ambulances are $3k, minimum. If you need helivac you’re look at $20-30k.
So what happens if you cant afford it? Like if you’re awake can you say “no I’d rather die on the street and let the city have to clean up my corpse”? And if you’re unconscious and you’re revived what happens? Like if you can’t afford any of it? And say you’ve already gone bankrupt and have no assets to seize or no job to garnish wages off of? Is it jail time? Do they just expect you to starve to death after? I’m not american so I’m curious, this seems like a fucking CRAZY system.
Like if you’re awake can you say “no I’d rather die on the street and let the city have to clean up my corpse”?
They will disregard that request and charge you anyway, which has led to people literally fleeing from ambulances to avoid the expenses. But it gets even worse.
Many mental health hotlines will contact the police if they think you present a danger to yourself and others. You can then be taken to a hospital and forced to stay there against your will, and by the time you’re able to leave you’ve accumulated a mountain of medical debt. Which, if you’ve been driven to contemplate suicide due to material circumstances, isn’t exactly going to help things.
However, for anyone thinking of calling a helpline, there are ones that don’t contact the police. You just have to look it up.
Like if you can’t afford any of it? And say you’ve already gone bankrupt and have no assets to seize or no job to garnish wages off of? Is it jail time? Do they just expect you to starve to death after?
The whole thing has gotten so inflated that people not being able to pay is pretty normal. What that means is that it is possible to haggle it down somewhat and negotiate on monthly payments. The actual value of these debts to the companies that hold them is a tiny fraction of the actual dollar amount of the debt, because they know a lot of them won’t be repaid. However, the companies will be try to get every drop they can squeeze from you, and even if you negotiate the payments down to something you can afford, the principal will be hanging over your head, likely for the rest of your like.
If you can’t pay, there’s no jail time, but there’s bankruptcy and foreclosures. If you own any significant assets, like say your house or car, that can potentially be seized in the event of bankruptcy, leaving you homeless or forced to pay rent, which is generally more expensive than mortgage payments, and potentially unable to get to work.
They won’t put you in jail (not until you’re homeless and charged with sleeping in public), but they will drain every drop of blood from your body like the vampires they are. In some cases literally, given that some people resort to selling blood to make ends meet.
Remember; America can afford to give border agents electrocution gloves, but can’t afford healthcare.
You just go into more debt. They can do stuff like sue to garnish wages or put a lein on your property, but mostly it just ruins your credit score.
Most non-profit hospitals have a budget for indigent care, though. And many hospitals will settle for a much lower amount if you just go talk to them.
I knew someone who racked up over $300k in cancer treatment, and when they talked to billing to set up a payment plan the hospital was so surprised someone actually wanted to pay that they dropped it to $10k.
The reason that health care costs are so high is because hospitals jack up the price so they can “negotiate” with insurance and everyone feels like they won. A lot of the massive bills you see are what hospitals send out before even billing insurance.
Someone else already answered the “what if” questions you had in another comment, but you’re right: it is a fucking crazy system. That is, until you realize its purpose is to keep us on unsure footing and beholden to employers so we’re more easily controlled.
Due to reasons I took an ambulance ride. For one and a half miles. From one hospital to another. They billed my insurance $6K
And both of those EMTs probably have a second job.
I had a seizure in a gas station. When I regained consciousness in the back of an ambulance I told them I asked them not to take me anywhere and to let me go on my way because I couldn’t afford the ride. The look on their faces told me a lot about how shitty our country is. They knew I was refusing medical attention I probably needed because I couldn’t afford for them to take me to a hospital I couldn’t afford treatment at, even with health insurance.
what the fuxxx
Didn’t factor in the hospital bill, the doctor bill, the nursing staff bill, the ems bill, the er doc bill, or the overnight fees… and then there’ll still be more and all separate.
The paperwork bill for generating all the paperwork. The admin bill, to review the paperwork. The convenience surcharge, for the cost of generating paperwork.
I’m pretty sure you replying to me has added more to my significant medical bills. Somewhere in this stack I think it has a “didn’t fake an ambulance, +$”
And they still probably expect tip too those morons.
Thankfully no tip line on those bills, but zero consolidation does make it hard to set up payments and know everything is taken care of… if that’s even possible.
That’s so scary not knowing whether a debt has been paid off properly or not.
While I appreciate my Japanese healthcare (I find it a bit better than Canada’s), it’s kinda weird not knowing the ballpark amount I’m going to pay BEFORE seeing the doctor. I get a bill at the end of my visit. They have an itemized list of things they did. Each item is given “points,” and they’re converted into yen at the end. I’m not even sure what each point amounts to how many yen (although, that’s purely on me, the answer is probably a duckduckgo search away). I don’t like the feeling that I might end up with a surprisingly expensive bill.
Someone once said an ambulance isn’t your personal taxi to the hospital, like my brother in fuck what do you think it is then?
At the risk of getting myself a rain of downvotes here:
An ambulance is an expensive and somewhat rare mini-ER on wheels that’s designed to help a small team of expensive and somewhat rare specialists stabilize a dangerous condition on a patient until it reaches a hospital. Since it is important to keep those somewhat rare vehicles and teams in reserve for when they are suddenly urgently needed, you really shouldn’t use one as a taxi to the hospital if whatever your condition is doesn’t call for that.
(Asking enormous sums of money of the patient for the privilege is IMHO still wrong. The decision to use an ambulance or not should not be based on whether you can can easily part with a couple thousand dollars.)
I don’t believe there is a problem of people needlessly calling ambulances.
If that was the case, the appropriate response would not be to charge everyone bank breaking fees for it.
We seem to in Japan. I see posters here every now and then. It basically says, “are you sure it’s an emergency,” and lists symptoms that might not be appropriate for calling an ambulance like having a slight fever or a hangover.
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If that’s the case, I imagine it would be better to charge people for frivolous use, rather than charge everyone. Or come up with a system where dispatch sends something else for non-emergency, if you can tell.
I’m not a policy expert, but the current system is bad for everyone.
It’s totally possible to get a near free ambulance system btw, many countries do it and in some there is somethig like 0.70~0.90€/km tariff, which is def not much
In more civilized countries, they would charge you for abuse if you call an ambulance when you don’t need it. But even the fine is less than this number.
So triage the issue remotely and send the appropriate response.
Stubbed toe? Reimburse a ride share.
Fractured arm? EMT in a lower cost van.
Urgent trauma? Full rig and EMT crew.
There is NOTHING expensive about the people in the back of that ambulance. They get paid less than I do working at a grocery store.
There is in the sense that they cannot easily be replaced. Whether they actually get paid appropriately for that is another story.
I’d be more ok with this if the expensive specialists on board were actually making bank instead of really low wages.
Exactly, its your personal free ride. Not like a taxi at all.
Yep. It’s free, it’s faster, and it has in-vehicle catering!
My mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago. She later got a bill for $2800 although medicare paid for some of that. Turns out the hospital she went to had its own associated ambulance service which wasn’t the ambulance service that gave her the ride. She later got a second bill from the hospital’s ambulance service, also for $2800, even though they hadn’t even given her the ride (medicare naturally enough did not pay for any of this bill). My mom was going to pay this second bill because I guess her generation just pays every fucking bill that shows up in the mail no matter what, but I put my foot down and insisted that she didn’t. I had a lot of fun calling them up and yelling at them about this bullshit. They refused to retract the bill and sent it a few more times, but eventually they gave up and didn’t send it to collections.
A fun side note to this story is that the hospital system in question became in danger of bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. A vulture capitalist firm noticed that the value of just the hospital system’s real estate holdings was a lot more than the sale price, so they purchased it and ran up a ton more debt paying themselves more than a billion dollars in bonuses. Then they spun off the real estate as a separate entity to which the hospitals started paying rent, which increased their operating deficit and debt still further. Eventually the hospitals declared bankruptcy and were closed down, leaving an entire city (of poor black people, natch) without any hospitals at all. Capitalism is just so awesome.
vulture capitalist
I’m going to reuse this
You should. Economists and other English speakers have been using it since at least 2008.
It’s a whole category, not a new term.
That’s amazing.
The US healthcare system is so broken… In Europe government pays nearly everything necessary for the injured or ill people. Kick out your clowns.
I wish it was only $1400. My last ride was $3400 for 8 miles. Even more crazy is my plan is $3600 a month for a family of 4. Kiaser HMO.
I would rather pay higher taxes than let these middle men take all our fucking money…
I will agree with both extremes. Either full government healthcare that is taxed but then it’s completely free, OR full private with no government intervention. Both have their benefits, but ours is the worst of both worlds and more expensive.
$1,400 is actually super cheap for an ambulance ride. I think they’re typically closer to $14,000
Usually more 3-5,000 for the ride. More medicine extra but most ambulance rides dont need extra.
Also somehow the paramedics doing the care are getting like minimum wage…its such a scam.
Some places in the US the EMTs are volunteer-only and don’t get paid anything…
I just realized that we don’t pay volunteer EMTs or Firefighters. And of course, I’m sure fulltime police officers outnumber the fulltime staffing of both firefighters and EMTs.
How the fuck have we survived this long?
What the actual fuck. These threads are so unbelievable to me.
What’s next, the EMT pays out of pocket for the privilege to work in an ambulance? Ridiculous.
I mean. Kinda. Usually they have to pay for their own training/EMT school before they even get the job.
I checked and 2 years ago the average cost was indeed about $1400:
Probably more now, although I doubt 10× as much…
I think there are two prices There’s the price they charge if you are paying “out of pocket” and the price they invoice insurance. It is possible for both the $1400 and $14000 ($6k is more likely) to be true.
Pricing is weird in the US.
One of the main reasons the list price is so high is because they know the insurance companies will negotiate and reduce the price. It’s like if you’re listing something on eBay or Marketplace and want $500 for it, you might list it for $600 or $650, because you know buyers will negotiate down to $500.
However, they can’t charge the insurance one amount while charging out-of-pocket customers a lower amount, because they’ll be sued by the insurance companies for insurance fraud.
Because of that, hospitals, ambulances, etc. need to initially charge everyone the same inflated prices, but they’ll basically always offer a discount if you say you’re paying out of pocket.
more than double Australia’s $622 average.
I’m from Melbourne in Australia (but living in the US now). In Melbourne, we pay around $60/year for an ambulance membership, and every ambulance ride (both road and air) is 100% covered.
It’s also included in most private insurance plans. We have a hybrid system where there’s both a public health care system (Medicare) that all citizens and permanent residents are eligible for, as well as a private one. For whatever reason, ambulances aren’t included as part of the public system.
That’s probably a factor (insurers make enough payments to hospitals they can demand lower prices and get them while out of pocket people usually don’t have much power to negotiate), but also this article makes it sound like $1400 is just the base price,
The report estimates the average ambulance ride in the United States costs $1,383.44, more than double Australia’s $622 average. The gap widens further with mileage fees: Americans pay about $19.49 per mile, while most other countries charge little to nothing based on distance traveled.
What
Wrong, its about $1500. Dont give misinfo. Its still idiodic it costs anything but dont lie
It’s possible that having insurance can change things, but I’ve known people who’s insurance didn’t cover an ambulance trip that ended up costing them nearly 10k. Out of network medical costs are a bitch.
That makes sense.
Gets out of the hospital, goes to a new school in this strange new place, gets shot, winds up back in the same hospital
Groundhog Day 2 is a bit grittier than the original.
$1,400? That’s only a small portion of a US ambulance ride. I’ve seen over $6k.
Honestly read it as 14,000 and didn’t think twice until you corrected it.
OP is giving prices from the good old days.
That’s the VIP one where they offer things life a bed, vehicle suspension, paramedics.
My dad used an ambulance about a year and a half ago. It was 3 blocks from his house to the hospital, and they still billed around $4k.
When I lived in the States back in '04, I took a 0.25 mile ambulance ride with no medical services provided. They didn’t even take my blood pressure. I was charged almost $7500 and paid nearly $700 after insurance. That’s about… $1400 in 2026 USD!
Yeah, but in the comic the bill is 1400 before insurance covers anything. Those aren’t 2026 prices, those are 2001 prices.
Whoa, I heard that in the US you have to pay for an ambulance, but $1,400? And this is with insurance?
When I was in college and on my own for the first time I tripped on the stairs and tore a ligament in my foot. I thought I’d broken something and the school called an ambulance. The ambulance drove me 1 mile to the hospital, where I was given an ice pack and crutches and then turned out with no way to get home (I had to hobble my way to a store to pull out cash to take a bus home).
This entire ordeal was $3000 after insurance. My mom then called me and bitched me out for not taking a taxi.
Capitalism turns an ordeal into a tragedy
$1400 is a wildly conservative estimate. In reality, it will be twice that.
$1400 is unrealistically cheap to the point where I’m pretty sure it’s part of the punch line here
Can be. The numbers are basically made up. It’s not uncommon for people to get their X-rays done at a chiropractor and take those to the Dr because it’s cheaper and insurance refuses to pay or it costs more even with insurance. I know someone who realized his wife’s insurance copay was more than if he paid cash for their kids birth. The insurance situation is insane and very complicated. Everything you hear about it is true and happens regularly. I tell people that I would rather have socialize medicine just for getting rid of the paperwork and nonsense. Unfortunately greed and racism are standing in the way.
What’s the point of insurance then? Sounds like a waste of money.
Fear. The insurance is not for “oh what if I break an arm and don’t have much cash in the bank” it’s “if I get cancer, or need to spend even a week in the hospital, all my life’s savings will be taken by this. Better give boatloads of cash every month forever to protect what I have against this.”
Then the insurance company does its best to wriggle out of paying anyways.
The point, at least in America, of insurance, is to make outrageous profits
The times when it’s tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The way it’s set up usually these days is that you have to pay for the first few thousand, then insurance pays part of the next few thousand and then they take over the rest. Unless they can figure out a way not to pay it. Because of insurance companies the cost of medical care has become massively inflated as well. Not just the extra paperwork and people, but also the hospital doesn’t care about being competitive, and they make up even bigger numbers so they can give insurance companies “discounts”. Then insurance just passes the cost back on the consumers.
to make money, just not for you
for the possibility of actually expensive treatment, like getting severely burned and needing skin transplants.
I paid 600 bucks for an ambulance to a hospital i could have walked to faster. Less than a mile… I couldn’t carry my mom, though so, ambulance it was. This was 20 years ago with good insurance.
woops meant to reply to Shatur
You sure have a strange way of using the word ‘good’
There’s a reason why people often opt for an Uber or just drive themselves to the hospital.
I made the mistake of calling for an ambulance once, and that’s the day I learned that they are owned by private companies in the US. I couldn’t afford the bill, so I had to put up with seven years of bad credit before the charge finally disappeared off my record and I was allowed to own a credit card and buy a vehicle without paying for it in full with cash.
On the bright side, weed is legal and abundant. And unlike in Amsterdam, you don’t even have to smoke it because it comes in so many different forms! So instead of going to the doctor, I just drink and vape to my health.
God I hate living in this country.
That’s without insurance, with insurance it depends. You can have a high deductible and pay that much, but a good plan if it’s necessary medically then it should be 0 to a 100 ish payment but sometimes you’ll have co-payment so it’s still like couple hundred.
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there are dumb dumbs in your country that want to replace your system with this one for efficiency or some shit
