Emergency Assistance Comes at a High Cost in Tarrant County
Area ambulances are trying to fund a new fleet of vehicles to decrease the time the injured have to wait for help. The only problem is, ambulance services like Medstar, are using patients to foot the bill.
Lately, Medstar has made changes to try and get to accident scenes quicker—their goal is to reach 90 percent of patients in less than nine minutes. To do this, they have recently started stationing their ambulances around the mid-cities area near places where personal injury accidents, like car crashes, commonly occur. Medstar services to 15 cities in Tarrant County and wants to add at least five more working ambulances, per day, to the current system.
Right now, Medstar has proposed the cities it serves to foot the bill for new vehicles and if they refuse to pay, the burden will fall onto the citizens. It seems to be putting city council members in tough positions. Some say that they’d be willing to pay for new vans if Medstar can prove its goal of reaching 90 percent of injured people within nine minutes. Those with critical injuries—usually from vehicle accidents, can’t wait much more than that for help.
Helping injured people receive quicker treatment is great, but many are worried about the cost—and for good reason. Currently, for a Medstar ambulance to pick a patient up, it charges about 1,200 dollars. On top of that, the company charges an extra fee for millage. Before a person even gets to a hospital, they’ve already racked up over a thousand-dollar bill. So obviously increasing this amount worries many people.
It will be interesting to see who ends up having to pay for this, and if it ends up being Dallas-Fort Worth Cities, how they’ll prove whether their money is being put to good use or not.
If you or someone you know has suffered bodily injury as the result of another person’s negligence, please call the Anderson Law Firm at 817-294-1900 for a free consultation.
