Chalk this one up as another piece of evidence that EMS is in the health care industry. It’s a dubious distinction that an entire region’s ambulance transport providers are being hammered for billing fraud under the Affordable Care Act, and being the poster child for medical waste.
Unfortunately, this isn’t new at all. I remember an incident decades ago where the owner of an ambulance service went to prison for similar charges. Unfortunately, that act bankrupted the company and put many good EMS providers out of work.
As our industry continues to mature and prove our value in the health care continuum, we need to do a better job policing ourselves — at all levels. From training and clinical practice, to business practices and leadership, we have had a litany of spectacular and very public failures.
To be fair, this kind of stuff happens in other parts of the health industry as well. The problem is that we are viewed more as public servants and part of the public safety net as compared to the rest of health care.
Organizations must have a series of checks and balances that oversee ethical behavior within themselves. It becomes very easy to become complacent and begin rationalizing poor behavior as simply the “cost of doing business.”
