Ambulance service is a revenue source for cities

June 30, 2021

A fire department's ambulance service is an important source of revenue for cities. For the City of Lansing, it brought in $3,919,121 in 2020. Here's how it ranked with other top sources:

	Property Tax	40,028,126
	City Income Tax	37,181,861
	Sales Tax - Constitutional	9,865,911
	Sales Tax - Statutory	4,521,025
	Fire Ambulance Services	3,919,121
	Fire Protection - State-owned Facilities	2,908,593

The figures come from this report of general fund revenues. Fire Ambulance Services is on page 3.

In never occurred to me that ambulance service was a source of revenue until I read a January 13 story on the online news source ELi (East Lansing Info). It said

East Lansing Fire Chief Randy Talifarro said that calls to ELFD, including for ambulances, are down about a thousand in number over the last year because the City’s population has dropped and the absence of big games means far fewer calls.

That means that ELFD income that is normally generated from medical insurance payments for ambulance calls is way down. But expenses are not down; personnel still have to get paid and trained, and equipment still has to be maintained.

As a major source of revenue, is it possible that a city would have an unwritten policy requiring police officers to insist on using the fire department's ambulance service even when it is not in the best interest of the injured?

Story #1. Earlier this year, I published a series of stories by John Morin, a former Lansing resident who now lives in Holt. Most were about his experiences with the Lansing police department. One, Assault at Apartment Complex, was about being the victim of an assault back in 2000. He got hit in the nose and was bleeding. A police officer came and John told him what happened. When the officer cleared him to leave and went to speak with the apartment management, John got in his pickup to take himself to the ER. Before he could get away, the officer ran back out, saying that he had called for an ambulance. John didn't think it was necessary. The officer told him that if he drove himself to urgent care he would arrest him for driving impaired. The manager had told him John had insurance. (He worked for the complex as maintenance man.) The officer said he had another call to go to, but if his truck was gone when he came back, he'd hunt him down and arrest him.

Insurance! That means payment is practically guaranteed!

John took the ambulance, but later learned that because he had punched out from work, the insurance would cover little, if any, of the bill, which was in the thousands. He ended up going to Ingham Medical on Greenlawn, where they took some Xrays, gave him Tylenol, and set up an appointment to see a specialist.

He had to walk home.

Story #2. In the story Lansing man terrified after he, fiancée, 3-year-old son, attacked by man with ax at Oak Park, Kara Berg of the Lansing State Journal gets the victims' side of this horrific June 19 incident that left the assailant dead and a man, his pregnant fiancée and their son seriously injured. Here, again, the police appeared to not want the man to drive his family to the hospital:

The man called 911 at some point — he's not sure when — and carrying his son like a football, grabbed his fiancee and took off toward the car. As he made to leave the park, half a dozen cops pulled up around his vehicle, he said.

They kept asking him questions about what happened, he said, even though he told them his fiancee was bleeding out. There was no ambulance yet.

Finally, an officer let the man drive his family to the hospital.

You'd think the police's first priority would have been to get medical care for this badly injured and traumatized family, either by allowing them to drive themselves to the hospital - Sparrow was only a few blocks away - or taking them in a police car. But no. They proceeded to get the facts. Or were they stalling until the ambulance arrived?

Delaying medical care wasn't all they did to this family. They also took their phones, leaving them no way to contact family or to communicate with each other in the hospital. The baby was delivered by Cesarean section.

"It was terrifying," he said. "I didn't know if my son or [my fiancee] were alive...I didn't get to see our daughter be born or celebrate it."

The family was victimized a second time by the police.

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