Hacker News Reader

Comment by justonceokay | Hacker News Reader

There’s the cost of supplies used during transport. Also the cost of maintaining potential supplies like blood even if they go unused. EMTs may make $23 but they are also getting benefits and have other overhead, making their real hourly cost probably closer to $50/hr minimum. There’s insurance, which I bet is out the wazoo expensive for ambulance. Ambulances have to be maintained and I would guess have much more regular service than your car at home. Ambulances have to be stored somewhere and secured-access parking isn’t cheap. Many ambulance rounds-trips can be well over an hour considering so many of us live far away from urban centers.

Is it $2600? Probably not. But I think you are low-balling pretty significantly.

Put another way, just getting a plumber to vibe to your house is gonna cost you $200 easy. It’s within reason that an ambulance ride might cost much more than that.

View on HN

I don't disagree with what you're saying but I want to point out that it's rather unusual for (American) ambulances to carry blood, and probably more of them should.

https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/news/10-wa...

Correct. The only ambulances that typically will stock blood are specialized NICU ambulances and HEMS (helicopter). Although more progressive agencies are looking more and more at part blood products.

EMTs are like veterinarians. Lovely people who get ruthlessly exploited. Benefits are garbage unless you’re a unionized public employee.

Yeah, every EMT I know was way underpaid for how crazy stressful it was. Especially considering how expensive the ride was

EMT now is often used as a stepping stone to a career with a liveable wage, like physician.

This is fairly funny to me because I reckon most residents only had to do research to get in. EMT and tech experience are negative differentiators in getting into medical school, which is a shame.

years ago i lived next door to a bar popular with off duty emts. interesting, to say the least.

Most people live in urban environments. Approaching zero are over an hour. As with most people being in urban environments most ambulance rides are in urban environments and go to the nearest hospital meaning that most rides should be under 10 minutes.

There is zero reason to compare cost of ambulance rides to a plumber and "vibe" on how much more expensive an ambulance ride instead of actually looking at the component costs. They aren't remotely related and one tells you nothing about the other.

Both the actual analysis you responded to and this one are also missing the fact that the ambulance is already subsidized and that usage fees aren't actually paying for the ambulance which makes the fees charged more onerous yet.

It might be instructive to look at what Canada charges non-residence as non-residents pay the unsubsidized rate of about $400-$600 Canadian.

https://www.cma.ca/resources/healthcare-real/answers/healthc...

Medical supply costs for transport are very small. The labor overhead costs are overhead. Insurance is included in the estimate.

A plumber charges you $200 to come to your house, it costs the plumber $20 to come to your house. The latter value is what we're discussing here.

If I charge $163 an hour for an electricians time, the cost to my job for one hour without material is between $130-140 depending on who it is. It only costs the plumber $20 if his time is free, which it isn’t.

TIL getting an elevator tech to just come out to look at your building's elevator is about $1600. If it's an easy fix, that's all you need to pay. If it's not, it goes up significantly....

Don’t they need to sign something legally binding, the moment they adjust even one minor internal part?

I'm not going to claim that elevator malpractice isn't possible, but no elevator is designed with a single point of failure for any safety critical system, so I don't think it's easy or likely to make a mistake that would cause a safety issue.

A qualified elevator technician can definitely make an elevator fail dangerously spectacularly.

They wouldn’t be qualified if they couldn’t.

To be fair, if you pay the repairman, your elevator also goes up :)

He wouldn't be much of an elevator repairman if it didn't go up considerably.

"We mark it down based on [income]".. Obviously it's profit first (I don't mind if you don't pretend that profit is a cost). It unfortunately seems cheaper to be uninsured for many cases if you're willing to pick up a phone and discuss prices and take the risk that it may not always work out (but then again dealing with insurances has its own set of annoyances and steadily rising costs).. Not a recommendation but clearly my observation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com