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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, a $111 (100 euro) ambulance ride would not be a reasonable amount if you were paying for it outright. You're paying for the time of 2 EMTs, your share of the supplies in the ambulance, your share of the ambulance vehicle, gas. Plus you're not just paying for the time it took for your ride, you're paying for your portion of the entire day (since not all their time is utilized). Even without considering profit, that's well over $111.

The fact that you're paying 100 Euro for the trip means is subsidized. Which is great, and it should be, but don't pretend 100 Euro is a reasonable price if you're actually paying for it.

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No subsidy, these are for private ambulances and a result of real competition.

Using an average wage in the US to be double of Europe I'd say $200 for an ambulance ride in the US is a reasonable price.

Also an ambulance ride is like 20-30mins tops and within a day there can easily be 4-5 calls in a larger city - that's more than enough to be profitable.

Wait, are you saying that 30k/mo gross is enough to run an ambulance service?

Easily.

  2 x EMTs @ $2,000 = $4,000 / month
  1 x $100,000 amublance amortized over 3 years = $3,000 / month
  150 gallons gas (150 miles per day @ 30mpg) x $2.50 = $375 / month
  Callcenter = $500 / month
  Overheads = $1000 / month
  Supplies = $1000 / month
  -----
  Total cost = $10,000 / month

Go to a busy ER and you'll discover that ambulance crews may have to sit around for 2-3 hours at times until they can fully hand off the patient.

The omission of things like liability insurance is curious, as well.

From what I hear in the UK, ambo crews don’t wait around, definitely not 2-3 hours.

(And they are all employed by the state [NHS], the state self-insures for liability, just like it self-insures for the ambulance’s car insurance.)

Perhaps you know better, but my uneducated guess would be that just an ambulance vehicle costs 15k/month, then every medic costs 10k/month at least and there will be expensive weird things like commercial insurance that costs another 5k/month. 100k/month might make you break even in the long run.

> You're paying for the time of 2 EMTs

For a fun little exercise, look up the average salary of an EMT.

When I did it on the side, six years ago, starting salary was $9.60/hr. (Thankfully I was doing it for experience, not a living).

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