My mom's neighbor has one. And by neighbor, I mean it's hanging on the door of a garage in the back of an alley, and his house is 10 minutes away. Not like he'd be there to call 911 most of the time anyway, I think I only saw him 3 times in 16 years of living there lol
You probably meant to use significant. Magnificent is something of high beauty. I don't think them stealing EMTs wage is beautiful but maybe you do so am not gonna judge you. /s /jk
Many years ago I was run over by a car, the charge of the ambulance was $800 USD, the total hospital bill for the 4 hours I was in "observation" was $28,000. I did not have medical insurance at that time.
Depends on aspect. Its actually not cheap to run an ambulence with the required personel and materials swapped often on call. I believe the main reason why its expemsive is because more often then not, the ambulence isnt paid for so said company takes a loss.
ambulence costs are also tied down by law in some cities, so for those specific cities, its the city making the cost, not the company.
For Europe, the bulk of the cost is covered by theor health care, so their out of pocket cost is low. In the U.S, its broken because insurance often denies the ride depending on insurance company and documentation.
If we assume an ambulance+equipment costs $500k and has to be replaced every 5 years, requires 4 personnel around the clock to operate with the cost of employing one being $50/h, one ambulance getting an average of 4 calls per day and per call average costs of gas, medicine and other disposable stuff being $300 we are looking at about per ride cost of $1500 so if one ambulance ride costs 12k as per the other comment, we are looking at a profit margin of 87.5% even with these very likely way too high cost estimations.
I think that even in parts of Europe why you do pay for health care, you don't pay for the ambulance. The reason being is that if the ambulance has already turned up, and the EMTs have already assessed you, it doesn't cost them any more money to transport you to the hospital so there isn't really any legitimate reason to charge you.
What ambulances really are is just flat operating costs. But those are costs that can be predicted ahead of time so they tend to be paid for either by the hospital through some grant, or from the city. Or through taxes, like with the rest of healthcare, in places with free healthcare.