[zepolen]

No subsidy, these are for private ambulances and a result of real competition.

Using an average wage in the US to be double of Europe I'd say $200 for an ambulance ride in the US is a reasonable price.

Also an ambulance ride is like 20-30mins tops and within a day there can easily be 4-5 calls in a larger city - that's more than enough to be profitable.

[mlguy456]

Wait, are you saying that 30k/mo gross is enough to run an ambulance service?

[zepolen]

Easily.

  2 x EMTs @ $2,000 = $4,000 / month
  1 x $100,000 amublance amortized over 3 years = $3,000 / month
  150 gallons gas (150 miles per day @ 30mpg) x $2.50 = $375 / month
  Callcenter = $500 / month
  Overheads = $1000 / month
  Supplies = $1000 / month
  -----
  Total cost = $10,000 / month

[mlguy456]

Perhaps you know better, but my uneducated guess would be that just an ambulance vehicle costs 15k/month, then every medic costs 10k/month at least and there will be expensive weird things like commercial insurance that costs another 5k/month. 100k/month might make you break even in the long run.

[ceejayoz]

Go to a busy ER and you'll discover that ambulance crews may have to sit around for 2-3 hours at times until they can fully hand off the patient.

The omission of things like liability insurance is curious, as well.

[MagnumOpus]

From what I hear in the UK, ambo crews don’t wait around, definitely not 2-3 hours.

(And they are all employed by the state [NHS], the state self-insures for liability, just like it self-insures for the ambulance’s car insurance.)