An ambulance ‘ride’ is two grand in the US, so avoid it if you can.
The patient (or their insurance) gets the bill.
Yep. Just one of the two to four bills you get for an ER visit via ambulance. That, the bill from the hospital, maybe an additional bill from the diagnosing doc depending on her status with the hospital, a bill from the treating doc if different from the first doc. Then pay for a ride home via taxi if you’re on your own. Or get admitted and then see some serious billing.
Ambulance companies have independent contracts with hospitals. Their bills in general go through the hospital, so the person receiving treatment is the person who will also get the bill for the Ambulance, helicopter, or fire department that assisted them.
The only time you would be liable for the bill would be under the premise of a false call. So if you called an ambulance for your neighbor who didn’t request one, you could be on the hook for the bill.
I wish the OP would come back and tell us what happened.
OP hasn’t been back since yesterday. Hope everything with roomie is OK. Hope he got piled into a cab instead of an ambulance. Or got a ride another way. If he couldn’t make the 3 block walk there, then once there he likely wouldn’t leave until being seen, since he wouldn’t be able to walk home anyway.
Good rule of thumb - if you have time to ask about it on a message board, it’s probably not an ambulance worthy emergency.
↑↑↑ This + the OP sounded more like an “Odd Couple” fight to me than an emergency. It was about him feeling bad in the future because of an idiot roommate IMO.
I worked with disabled people, and we had a few people who were epileptic as a comorbidity with other problems. Seizures are not 911 events unless the person falls and hits their head and is bleeding from the mouth or nose. I had a lot of headaches dealing with ambulance services trying to get bills waived for people on very limited incomes who never should have been transported.
Now, if this is someone you know, who is NOT a diagnosed epileptic, and has never had a seizure before, you might want to think about going to the hospital, and 911 may be a good idea if the seizure goes on for a long time, or the person is completely disoriented afterwards.
They take even something that is a precursor to interrupted breathing seriously. I had an allergic reaction to a medication once that made my face puff up a little. I was having no trouble breathing at all, but I never got taken back so fast, and that includes the time I was 11 weeks pregnant and having abdominal pains (which turned out to be mild food poisoning, and everything was fine, but geez-- course, it was one of the lowest-rated ERs in the country).
I had sort of the opposite situation come up with an ambulance once. In the US, you can get stuck with 100% of a medical bill for refusing medical services Against Medical Advice (AMA), which means that, for example, if you go to the ER, and the doctor wants to keep you overnight, but you insist on leaving, you can get billed for the whole ER visit, even if you have insurance.
Well, I was in a car accident, and unconscious when the ambulance was called. The EMTs wanted to transport me because they thought my ankle might be broken (it wasn’t). I was advised to go, because my insurance covered ambulance transport, but if I refused the EMTs advice, I might get stuck with a bill for the whole run plus the EMTs exam. I was actually cool with being transported, but it was some standard disclaimer they had to read me, I guess.
My understanding is that this is widely believed by doctors and nurses, but is not true.
I think it depends on your carrier, and I checked with my carrier, and it was something that they could, in fact, do (or, I suppose, not do, but probably any excuse to deny a claim…). I could contest it, but I didn’t intend not to comply anyway.
It gets sticky because they don’t want you to leave when the doctor wants to do an ultrasound to check for an inflamed appendix, and you leave because you don’t want an appendectomy, then you return three days later with a burst appendix and peritonitis that requires a week-long stay and IV antibiotics, when the appendectomy would have been a one-day stay.
So, I think what happens is, if you protest, they’ll review the case, and if it looks like your decision to leave ultimately cost more money, you are SOL-- or at least on the hook for whatever the estimate of the extra your bad decision cost.
Like I said, not all carriers may have this policy, though. My carrier at the time did. On the whole, it was pretty good (especially, it never charged more than $16 for a brand name drug if a generic was not available, which was a pretty rare thing-- I knew people with $60 copays for brand name drugs that weren’t available in generic), so I guess you get good coverage by putting up with them cutting corners in other places.
If you follow my link, you’ll see that it was not true for any of the 526 patients who left an Illinois hospital AMA during 2001-2010. When and where did your story occur, and why do you think that your insurance would have denied the claim? Did a doctor tell you that they would, or was it someone at the insurance company? What company was it?
This was in 1997, and I was told this by an EMT, but I followed up with a call to my carrier, who said yes, they may deny a claim if I leave AMA. Of course, I suppose they “may” deny any claim, and I suppose it’s possible the person I talked to didn’t really know much, and just gave me a wishy-washy answer that covered his ass no matter what happened. I asked if I had any recourse, and he said I could file a protest, just like with any claim that was denied.
If someone told me that a person left AMA, and then came back in much worse shape, needing more expensive treatment, and had the claim denied, or adjusted somehow for their stupidity in letting themselves get into worse shape, when they were right there and could have been treated earlier, I would not be in the slightest bit shocked.
On the other hand, there were a lot of coverage gaps and loopholes, like the “pre-existing condition” denial that you could get if you changed carriers because you changed jobs, which existed in the 1990s, and now no longer exists by federal law, as long as you had no gap in coverage-- and the COBRA coverage to prevent gaps.
So I also would not be shocked if this were true in 1997, but were no longer true.
There are no countries in which people don’t pay for emergency evaluation/treatment/transport.
The ones with “free” EMT service just don’t get hit with a big bill for it all at once.*
*unlike those who lack adequate health insurance.
He finally went on his own yesterday afternoon. They told him he had COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and sent him home.
Thanks for the followup. So often on this board one shoe drops and we never hear (or hear of) the other one. That’s a serious diagnosis. Good luck.
Right. But a person calling for an ambulance for a third party who is not themselves won’t get billed for the ambulance. Only the party who is being transported, which was the subject of this thread.
There is a widespread belief, in some Third World countries where there is no socialised medicine, that the ambulance-caller will have to pay if they can’t find anyone else to bill, thus many people there are very reluctant to call one for a stranger, or a person who appears to be without wealth.
I got a $75 bill for a St John ambulance transporting my partner to hospital. It’s gone up since then. If I paid $65 a year to St John, then no bill. Non-eligible people* using the same service would be charged $800.
If I need an ambulance because of an injury, then it gets paid by ACC. Non-residents lawfully in the country are also covered, so no bill.
In any case you will not be billed if you simply called the ambulance for someone else.
*Eligible people are NZers, Niueans, Cook Islanders, Tokelauans, working visa holders and UK citizens.
Not true, in the UK it is perfectly possible for a person to never pay a penny of taxes and yet never be billed for the treatment and medicine they receive. In any case, no-one ever sees a actual bill for emergency evaluation/treatment/transport
That depends a bit on your definition of “free” really. Most developed nations pay less taxes for government health care than the US, per citizen.
So from the perspective of a healthy American taxpayer, who sees citizens of other nations pay less towards their healthcare and get a 100 % coverage out of it, they get it for free. The pay less than he does, and get healthcare which he doesn’t. Except as he pays extra for it, out of pocket or out of wages.
Those which have it “free” have it “free” like any other part of the healthcare system that’s “free”: there’s no billing involved, it’s paid for from taxes. Not a big bill at once, not any bills for those parts ever.