Teen lifeguard gets $2,600 bill for saving drowning boy's life

Originally posted by TKDRL
What the hell....... For profit medical industry sucks major donkey nuts.

Lets say 10 grand per ride, that means 5,500,000,000 bucks a year made for helicoptor medical evacs.

You obviously have no idea what the overhead is on running such a service.
You have the pay for a highly specialized helicopter, which has to be constantly serviced, inspected, fueled, and hangered.

Take a look at the rates for helicopter rentals (chosen at random): Paradigm Helicopters

Price per hour on renting an aircraft is by engine hour, not by driving hour. That means that it starts the minute the engine starts, and does not stop until its shut off (hold time, taxi time, pilots checklist time, etc. are all while the engines are clocking hours). This is because aircraft engines have to be overhauled every so many hours at various levels. So for example, on the planes I used to fly, the engines had to go through a basic overhaul every 500 engine hours. The more complex the aircraft, and its engines, the more expensive the operating costs. Emergency aircraft are some of the most complex aircraft, with the strictest rule requirements.

This is not like your car that gets a $30 oil change every 20K miles and a fill-up once a week.


Too everyone else griping about the medical field.
Not to diminish what this guy did, but lets be fair here...
He went to the hospital and got admitted as a patient, after doing something on his own time, which was not covered under his work insurance. Hospitals are not charity organizations, they are businesses, they operate on funding without which they would not exist.

City/County/State fire department ambulances charge money because there are actually folks who will call on them to drive them to doctors appointments, or to go shopping, like they are a taxi service (Yes! This happens a LOT, I get FD guys at work bitching about it all the time). Private ambulance companies have overhead to operate, and cannot remain in business if they do not make a profit.

Medical people expect a paycheck, the same as every other profession on the planet. Just because there is a sad story behind why a person is in the hospital, does not mean that they will not be charged money for the cost of their services. Every person in the hospital has a tale of woe, if they didn't charge all of them money for their services, they would cease to exist. Hospitals and Doctors offices have HUGE amounts of operational overhead, and the government adds more overhead each year with less money paid out for service.

Its the only industry on the planet, which the government feels it has to right to preform price fixing on, while heaping on huge amounts of regulations. The government certainly does not go to an Auto Manufacturer, tell them they have to give you a vehicle that costs $100,000 to produce, for $18,000, now do they? Outside of certain specialists and physicians, most highly educated/registered/certified medical people make on average less per hour then most electricians, plumbers, auto workers, etc...