Slept in my car in the station parking lot March 2020. Was stupid common.

I’m vested thanks.

Let me know what other job offers the ridiculously good health plan (valued at $18,000/yr according to the tax forms) unlimited sick leave, no termination without a hearing, shift differentials, meal allowances, free training for your license and CDL, guaranteed annual raises, and a pension that vest in 5 years, to a punk 18 yo with no work experience and a GED.

It’s hard work at low pay. But jobs that don’t require you to purchase specialized education in advance generally are.

You also get double billed for hospitals because FDNY bills for an NYC ambulance in addition to the actual hospital. I forgot how exactly the bill looks.

It is a very high number, but it probably has a smaller number of individuals getting multiple transports.

Looking a little more closely, I think this includes more than emergency ambulance transports. It says there are 1,121 "total 9-1-1- ambulance tours" per day, which rounds out to 409,165 per year. Which is a lot, but also a lot less than the 1,092,752 "hospital transports" listed. So that larger number presumably includes non-emergency transports (and potentially lower levels of care than a full ambulance).

I can personally name at least 5 patients of mine whom go to the hospital via ambulance at least 5 times a week. It's usually not even with the Fire Department but a voluntary ambulance instead which I believe isn't included in that cited metric.

A few people take a lot of trips to the hospital.

This is the way. Same for education.

see above

They get cut off in other countries or charged for it when they do.

This isn’t empathy, it is limited resources, when anyone can just order up an ambulance for any reason, they won’t be around for people who really need them.

Where is your empathy for those people?

It’s not empathy people lack. It’s money.

The taxpayer is not a bottomless source of cash to set on fire. Especially not on behalf of people who should have been in custody all along, be it inpatient or plain old jail.

>Ukraine has nothing to do with corporations fucking everyone over.

It does have a little to do with it (defense contractors).

Not really , I think healthcare is one of those things we can do better .

Im not exclusively blaming it on the Ukraine situation, but we always seem to have money for wars and stuff we don’t really need . Yes , we need a strong military but is not fair when other countries don’t cheap in nearly as much per citizen

>>they were busy tending to a drunk > >Ah yes, someone overindulged, so therefore they shouldn't receive free emergency treatment because they're a shit stain on society. Let's continue the course of obliterating people into debt asking for emergency (or any kind of) healthcare.

This is the part that kills me. Because A SMALL MINORITY of people may abuse the system, that means we need to keep the current system of people potentially using taxis to get to the hospital to avoid being financially crushed by a $1k bill from an ambulance ride.

I used to be an EMT . There are frequent flyers with non emergency issues very often and they deff take up resources. Most of the time it's just elderly people who are on medicare. These people are usually poor and they use it as a way to get free medication. There are also people with mental illness who have some episode. Bringing them to a hospital does not really solve the issue but we have no other way to deal with these kinds of people besides the police. But the worst kind of people are the ones who are just trying to score narcotics. I didn't see that happen to often but i imagine it does in worse areas.

Being drunk is rarely a 911-level emergency requiring ambulance response. Not unless somebody is driving drunk or aspirating on their own vomit.

And nobody needs EMT response multiple times daily.

Might, my ass.

People DO abuse the system. A lot. And taxpayers pay for it all.

This is classic tragedy of the commons: a small but significant part of the population monopolizing and misusing services that are for the -entire- population, and going unpunished even in extreme cases.

First responders can let the frequent flyer know about the existing non-emergency programs for the caller, and either they get with the program or face fines and charges. These are existing programs in many jurisdictions.

But not New York City, it would appear.

Google “312 Riverside Drive” in Manhattan. It won’t show up on a map because it doesn’t exist, but it is the reported address for thousands of fake 911 calls.

From ONE guy. In this case, an old crackhead in a shelter. (That’s “older individual experiencing crackheadedness” for the exquisitely sensitive.)

Last I knew, he’s still at the shelter and still messing with 911.

Which seems to be okay by New York. One idiot Karen makes one racist 911 call about a birdwatcher and the politicians fall over themselves to pass something on bogus 911 calls involving a protected class.

But when it comes to the other hundreds of thousands of fake calls they don’t do dick.

Not getting help?

First responders have to provide some kind of service to people they know full well are delusional because they've dealt with their shit thousands of times.

"One man with a cellphone has created enough havoc to be hauled over and over into court, but not enough to warrant a prison cell. He knows it’s wrong, and he apologizes to the judge, but he won’t stop*."*

...but whose cases account for countless hours in court, counseling sessions, medical appointments and other city services."

And we're on the hook for all of it. For everybody else in a city of 8 million who pulls this crap. Eventually some first responders figure out the calls are bogus but there's lots of turnover so it's a lesson that has to be repeatedly and expensively learned.

Services? There are craploads of services.

The services that work are the ones where he's put in a secure facility. With no phone.

Fine, call them free if you'd like.

You still can't endlessly dump false-alarm and non-emergency calls on EMTs and expect them to sit there and take it. Not for any wage.

You also don't want cops responding to non-emergencies, do you? That's the leftist talking point, but when some eager beaver fresh out of the academy arrives on the scene because such is the insistence of the Reddit masses, don't be shocked when a mentally-ill repeat caller who should have been in an inpatient facility gets plugged.

It is is partly a taxpayer funded service and should remain as such, but that can’t be defined as unlimited services to everyone everywhere forever.

There has to be a “shit list” for people who misuse the service, so that it’s still available for people with legit needs.

Careful, don’t give them any ideas!

It's been a good decade for tech...

But yeah seriously, I know I'm not the median, but I'm also not a billionaire over here. There's over half a million people in NYC alone making my income or more and paying those taxes.

The problem here is never that there's no money for something, the sums allocated to various things in the city budget are mind blowing and not seen in any other city in the world. We just don't seem to get much for it.

We’re too busy propping up European countries who can’t put up the coin to defend themselves. Waste of fucking cash.

Completely agree , the media has a tight grip on everything , push a false narrative to go to wars to justify military spending etc , they don’t put out what they don’t want the general public knowing . Plus wouldn’t be surprised if they started arresting people if a protest happened and got out of there control