Those of us whose age makes us more likely to break a hip or have a heart attack need to think about ambulance runs. Even if you have medical insurance there may be a deductible. I recently took a lecture from Dewey Miller of MASA (seen in photo above), the member-supported Medical Air Services Association. He pointed out that the average ground ambulance ride bills at around $1700, and taking the ride by helicopter runs more like $50,000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know of a case near me where a patient was med-evaced by helicopter to a hospital eighty miles distant, with a bill in the $30K range. Jack Dixon mentioned that MASA paid for his whole $37,000 ground ambulance run during a storm too bad for helicopters to fly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those are particularly hard hits for those who don\u2019t have medical insurance at all. I noticed at the seminar that the youngest attendees were in their sixties. Apparently the young think they\u2019re immune. Having taken my first ambulance run as a patient at sixteen and my second at twenty-five, both from totaled automobiles, I don\u2019t think the meat wagons are just for the elderly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a related note, one of my pet peeves is self-defense instructors who tell their students, \u201cIf you have to shoot someone in self-defense, fake a heart attack and ask for an ambulance so the detectives can\u2019t interrogate you.\u201d Quite apart from establishing that you\u2019re a liar (because emergency room records will show there was nothing really wrong with you) as you enter a legal situation in which your credibility is going to be vital, even if you do have medical insurance it probably won\u2019t pay for an ambulance ride which lacked medical necessity. You will also have tied up limited emergency medical services that might have been needed for a genuinely stricken patient elsewhere in the community\u2026kind of hard to reconcile with being the proverbial \u201cgood guy or gal with a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All to delay being questioned by police\u2026when all you had to do to accomplish that was to say, for free, \u201cI will cooperate with you as soon as I\u2019ve spoken with legal counsel, but for now I\u2019m invoking my right to remain silent as to any further questions.\u201d For more information on MASA check out their website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those of us whose age makes us more likely to break a hip or have a heart attack need to think about ambulance runs. Even if you have medical insurance there may be a deductible. I recently took a lecture from Dewey Miller of MASA (seen in photo above), the member-supported Medical Air Services Association. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9111,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions\/9111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}