Comments by "" (@Green__one) on "How Air Ambulances (Don't) Work" video.

@HR15DE Thing is, without all the profit centres and the insurance middlemen, the tax portion paid by civilized countries towards their health care systems are dramatically less than the insurance you americans pay. We pay LESS, and get statistically better outcomes. We just call it "tax" instead of "insurance", personally I don't care what it's called as long as I pay less total and get better outcomes.
577
Some pretty flawed studies quoted in this video. For most of the studies he didn't really explain what was studied, the ones he did pretty much supported the golden hour, or weren't relevant. One talked about the 8 minute EMS response time instead of the golden hour, another said that time didn't matter, as long as it was less than 90 minutes (ok, so we can quibble on the exact number of minutes, but 90 vs 60 isn't really that different, and you have to factor in time before emergency services gets there, time stabilizing for transport, time at hospital, and the fact that the hospital you're 90 minutes away from might be level 5 not level 1). As a paramedic with many years of rural experience, I will never hesitate to call a helicopter when one is needed. That said, here the bill my ground ambulance will send the patient is higher than the one the helicopter will charge them. (Ground ambulance has a flat fee of $385, air ambulance is free)
50
Where I live, Air ambulance cost to patient: $0. In fact it's actually cheaper here to use an air ambulance than a ground one. The ground one will charge $385. The helicopter will charge nothing. For this, the government pays $7.2 million per year to cover 3 full time helicopters from 3 different bases hundreds of km apart. Last year that covered 1325 flights. Total cost to the patients: 0, cost to the government: $5434/flight (to be fair, operating the air ambulances does cost more than that, but the non-profit organization running the service also fundraises through donations and running a lottery. Their total budget for the year was about 4 times the government contribution) The dollars quoted here are also worth less than the US dollar.
2