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Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

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Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#241
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m a foreigner and I’m breaking my arm while being in San Francisco, do I have to pay for the 5k bill coming my way, too ?

Depends on the quality of your travel insurance. Some credit cards come with automatic travel insurance, but regardless it is well worth researching before you travel. Hospital stays abroad sometimes need to be paid out-of-pocket until you are reimbursed later on. It all depends on the circumstances, your country of origin and any extra insurance you might have taken out. I ended up in hospital for a fairly routine o…

My aunt broke her shoulder while travelling in the US and had to fly back to Ireland to get it properly treated after an initial x-ray. She would have been ruined financially otherwise.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a ride in a vehicle is it? Ambulances carry paramedics and sometimes doctors, tens of thousands of dollars worth of drugs and equipment. Even if you don't use all of that, they can't do anything else during the time that they're on your call, they need to be heavily insured, and they also need to stand by all day waiting for calls.

The numbers still seem extremely high, even if an ambulance only does 3 trips a day on a bad day, that's over 10k USD. A private ambulance ride in Thailand (Im not talking rescue org ambualances) for example is $80-$120. Now I understand the service standard might not be as high, and wages are lower, and so on, but is it really 40x as expensive in USA to cover costs? Actually a better example, might be HKG, where ser…

Note that paramedics make relatively little and are on a volunteer basis in many areas.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#243
post #232
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is pretty much nothing that infuriates me more than the health insurance system. Here is just one example (other than your ambulance example, which is like some trolley-car problem come real): We use "insurance" for routine medical examinations which are supposedly to be done regardless of health. We use "insurance" for YEARLY checkups. The absurdity of this is on par with insuring yourself against getting hung…

To be fair, a lot of stuff work that way. Take an HVAC maintenance plan for example. For some fee (based on the model and age of your HVAC and the condition it's in), you get routine maintenance covered. They do what they can to prevent major hiccups, but if it breaks down, they'll repair it (after trying to weasel their way out of it). It's pretty darn common across a lot of industries.

There's a pretty important difference between humans and HVACs, which is the reason the two systems end up being very different.

You can always rip out the HVAC and put in a new, off the shelf unit with roughly the same specs (often better, because progress) at a fixed, known cost, and the customer will even often be happier if they end up doing that instead of repairs. If health care providers could trivially decide to euthanize and replace patients with expensive diseases, health care insurance would be as trivial as HVAC maintenance plans.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any proof for that? AFAIK the percentage of black people in prison in the EU is smaller than in the US for example. I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way.

> I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way. It's a lot harder to collect data when you expunge all references to race from the law, and also prohibit public institutions from collecting data on race and ethnicity, as five European countries have already done. Heck, you'll be hard-pressed to find reliable statistics f…

Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist? That's certainly an interesting way of looking at it.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any proof for that? AFAIK the percentage of black people in prison in the EU is smaller than in the US for example. I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way.

https://www.apnews.com/e6ab521552b64a399f79a223d8006e5e/Raci... European soccer games, for example, have had many examples of widespread racist chants and gestures. Racism is absolutely a problem in Europe.

That's mostly football ultras[0] though. They are usually the lowest common denominator, it's like saying the US has issues with education because there are people who believe that the earth is flat. Besides, I did not say there's no racism in Europe, I said it's not institutionalized.

I should also add that discrimination in European countries is based more along ethnic and nationalistic lines, not race or color the way it's in the US. While in the US people are categorized by their "race" (black, white, asian, middle eastern, etc), in Europe they are categorized by their country or geographical area of origin (Polish, Italian, French, English, Eastern European, Western European, etc). A black English guy is not primarily "black", he is primarily English.

It's also quite interesting how US-centric this website is and how patriotic most of you are.

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras)

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ROTLF my yearly season ticket 65 miles to London is £4,688.00

Which scales fine, with the 65 mile Uber ride costing you closer to £100.

show me an uber that can do the trip in 35 mins :-)

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can live for weeks without food, it can be stored easily (unlike services which aren't stored at all), and the barrier to entry is low... Many people even have their own food gardens. It's also very amenable to nearly complete automation. Therefore food is super cheap.

Those things you just described certainly sound an awful lot like food to me. How exactly is that living without food for weeks?

I was talking about food. Sorry if I was unclear!

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way. It's a lot harder to collect data when you expunge all references to race from the law, and also prohibit public institutions from collecting data on race and ethnicity, as five European countries have already done. Heck, you'll be hard-pressed to find reliable statistics f…

Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist? That's certainly an interesting way of looking at it.

> Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist?

It certainly doesn't eliminate racism from society, no. It just makes it impossible to measure the effects of racism independently. Hence, the racism becomes integrated into the rest of the society.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#249
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could he just said "I didn't call for ambulance, charge the guy who did"?

The unintended consequence of allowing that to happen would be that people would be hesitant to call for an ambulance for someone else. It will cost lives. I would expect any sane legal system to have strong legal protections for good Samaritans.

In the same sense that it would protect unconscious people from incurring enforceable debts?

A sane system would look at the incentives structure to devise cartel rules to encourage the individual behaviors that lead to the best group outcome.

The injured party desires swift and effective treatment for their injury. They also desire such treatment to be affordable, preferably at no additional out-of-pocket cost.

Onlookers may wish to help in the moment, but they do not want to incur any future obligations by doing so.

Medical providers want the customer brought to their facility, first to assist with the injury, and then also to be rewarded for producing better outcomes due to their care and expertise.

The move that makes sense is for injured parties and onlookers (they cannot know in advance who would be the unlucky one to get injured) to cartelize, and each pay an amount in advance so that the statistically predictable annual number of ambulance rides are all (theoretically) already paid for. And since it could damage the patient to delay care by attempting to verify cartel participation, it really has to include everyone, or ignore free riders. So the cartel becomes a branch of government, and it pays for ambulance rides with some form of tax. Then to prevent gaming the system by private ambulance companies, the cartel can either announce limits on what it will pay for during one ambulance ride, or it can run its own ambulance service.

And to further control costs, if they haven't already determined that it is an emergency with major traumatic injuries, the dispatcher can even just ask the caller if an ambulance is not needed. Most people can at least recognize if someone else does not need an ambulance, and maybe just needs an ordinary ride to the hospital without all the equipment and paramedics. The dispatcher can summon a cab, or Lyft, or Uber, or a bicycle rickshaw, or church bus, or shuttle van, or any other type of local transportation service, and pay their prevailing rate for a prompt, on-demand ride to some form of medical care facility. Since the patient would have to be conscious in order to get a not-ambulance ride, they could either wave it off, or tell the driver to go to their pick of clinic or hospital and have the ride paid for by their ambulance tax.

Other moves create perverse incentives to ignore injuries or hinder the care of an injured person.

Similar analysis indicates that hospital treatment for life-threatening injuries and other health emergencies should also be paid for out of taxes. The rest of the medical system could possibly operate under a different model, but I think most people would rather not be forced to choose between death and bankruptcy--for themselves or anyone else--when there's a dearth of time to think about it.

Re: Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage

#250
post #191

I injured myself and needed to go to the ER. The injury wasn't life threatening, but I definitely needed to go to the hospital immediately. I called an Uber. I don't have the time or expertise to do the months of legalese and calculus it would take me to understand my insurance policy, so I have no idea how much an ambulance ride would have cost me. $0? $400? $15000? None of those numbers would surprise me. As best I…

They sent me a bill for over $900. For taking a picture, and giving me tylenol and an ace bandage. That is awful :( Imagine someone making minimum wage. 900$ is huge for most people. Honest question - outside of politics, is there anything a person on the road do to help make this situation better (other than not falling sick)? Any company/org working on solutions?

Generally speaking, most of the people "working on the problem" are actually working out ways to profit enough from the existing mess that it doesn't affect them personally.

If you intend to visit the US, you absolutely need to buy traveler's insurance, with medical coverage, before you enter. If you can't afford the premium, cancel your trip, and go spend money in a country with a better paradigm for emergency medicine.

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