hunter-rodrigez:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Prescott Valley, AZ is home to 150,000 people and a single private ambulance operator with the exclusive regional franchise: Lifeline Ambulance, a division of American Medical Response (AMR) — a predatory monopolist that has snapped up many smaller ambulance companies and locked in lucrative exclusivity deals with many US cities and towns.

Unlike AMR’s EMTs, the firefighters in Prescott Valley are public servants, working for the Central Arizona Fire and Medical Authority (CAFMA). AMR hates CAFMA, because CAFMA has its own, unauthorized ambulance that it uses to save lives when AMR’s penny-pinching gets in the way.

For example, last August, a 911 operator took a call about a baby that had drowned in a bathtub and wasn’t breathing. AMR’s staff said they were 12 minutes away. So CAFMA’s firefighters used their “unofficial ambulance” to transport the baby to a helicopter, and thence to a hospital. The baby lived.

AMR was livid. They narked out the firefighters to the state authority, demanding an investigation as to why the firefighters were cutting into their business.

https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/firefighters-who-used-backup-ambulance-to-rescue-a-baby-now-under-investigation

It’s not the first time, either: AMR has filed at least 15 complaints with the Arizona Department of Health Services, seeking to limit firefighters’ use of their own ambulance.

AMR’s regional director John Valentine told ABC 15’s Dave Biscobing that he isn’t filing “complaints” — rather, these are “information requests.” This is the private ambulance ghoul version of one of those t-shirts that says, “It’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a sex-machine.”

Across the state, local emergency authorities are begging the regulator to let them add more ambulances than are provided by monopoly private contractors like AMR. AMR insists that it’s “meeting deadlines.”

Meanwhile, CAFMA Chief Scott Freitag is intent on forcing the issue. Rather than furtively using the firefighters’ ambulance to save lives, he’s sending the regulator a weekly list of every time the ambulance has to be dispatched because AMR was too slow.