Brewer and Bonsignore discuss ambulance billing and EMS response times

The other thing I had a question about was just, again, I hear what you're saying about the ambulance transportation fee.

So what you're saying is if somebody doesn't have insurance and they're self-pay, but they can't pay, then they can get...

support.

Is that what you're trying to say?

Do people do that?

People do.

So there's a phone number on every ambulance bill for our billing vendors call center and they can call

and talk through the options there.

But there is a charity care program that's based on the same household size and income guidelines that health and hospitals uses.

And then response time for ambulances.

What is it generally, up, down, in between?

How is it going?

And I appreciate your support for parity strongly.

And we appreciate your support as well.

And just to your training comment, I've met with many of you.

We've talked about strategies on how to get messaging out.

Because the real success is not having a fire to begin with.

The real success is not going into cardiac arrest from the beginning.

So when we prevent those things, that's where the real life-saving work is.

So I appreciate all of you spending time with me talking about different ways to get your constituency on message as to what they can do to keep themselves safe.

Response times, as we've seen, they can fluctuate, but we have seen that response times are going up.

And this is quite honestly why I'm coming out so loudly for EMS parity.

When we have an increased year after year demand for 911 services and we have staffing that is going in the other direction due to recruitment and retention

challenges, that equation will lead to increased response times.

Now, there are other things that cause...

increased response times too.

That's not the only thing that we can point to.

There are things like, I know when I started, there were 20 additional hospitals within the five boroughs than there are right now.

So as hospitals close, our EMTs, our paramedics need to go further.

They need to wait longer in the emergency rooms that need to absorb that additional call volume.

You know, there are lots of different things that go into this problem,

things that we are taking very seriously, and any possible solutions that we can come up with to reduce response times, including, as Chief Miano was talking about a minute ago,

you know, moving units into areas of higher demand.

And we watch the demand across the five boroughs all day, every day.

So we see where there are areas that are really getting inundated with calls or response times are higher.

And we're able to shift some, but that doesn't mean that response times automatically go down all together, right?

So it may go down in that area and we'll have to shift some resources around.

But it is something that we watch very closely because there are so many different factors that go into it.