Ambulance service to drop Key West
By John L. Guerra
CARE Ambulance, the private company that has the Key West contract to transport injured and sick people to Lower Keys Medical Center, has told city officials that it will no longer provide the service after April 1.
The city is studying how to run its own ambulance service using EMTs already in the Key West Fire Department. The city also would have to lease or buy an ambulance and other equipment to create the service, according to emails among city departments.
“We’re looking to see what it will take to run our own service,” Key West Mayor Craig Cates said Friday. “The company was losing too much money every month.”
CARE, which charges patients about $900 for a trip to the emergency room at LKMC from downtown Key West, has been unable to collect from many of the people it has transported. Many patients are homeless, lack health insurance or can’t afford to pay the bill, Cates said.
And there are a lot of ambulance calls. In 2012, CARE recorded 5,637 runs to the hospital, an average of 470 a month.
The company won its bid in 2011 after offering to provide the service without the traditional $50,000 subsidy other ambulance services have collected during their contracts, Cates said. After running for a couple of years at a loss, CARE has decided to pull out.
City residents will not be without ambulance service after April 1; if the city hasn’t found another provider by then, CARE has offered to continue its service if the city agrees to pay them $50,000 a month.
The city’s ambulance plan, still in development, would include buying or leasing one new ambulance and four used and staffing them with up to 20 EMTs, according to a proposal from the fire department.
Total Start-up costs for equipment, including the ambulances, cardiac monitors, stretchers, and other medical equipment would be $539,629.60, the fire department stated.
According to figures from the city, the ambulance company has had to write off a large bulk of its billing.
In October, 2013, for instance, CARE wrote off $387,663 in fees but collected just $120,000 from Medicaid, Medicare and health insurance companies for patient transportation to the hospital.
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Knew this was coming. Red flag #1 was CARE offering the service for FREE. The Commisioners should have asked themselves how can a much smaller company offer this when AMR (the largest company in the US) required a subsidy. I’m sure AMR could have shown them how many patients were either homeless and/or uninsured. A little info/knowledge can go a long way. Red flag #2 came after their first year of having the contract. CARE requested their $1,000,000 surety bond be reduced to $500,000 which the Commissioners approved like a bunch of fools. That right there tells me CARE was already losing their asses, and this was the only way to try and recoup some of these losses without violating the contract. The city should have stayed with AMR, and I hope they renegotiate with them and bid CARE a farewell.