By Sarah Watson
Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus
SCOTT COUNTY, Ill. — The nonprofit ambulance service MEDIC EMS will become part of Scott County government, starting Jan. 1.
If all goes smoothly, 911 callers won’t notice any difference.
For anyone expecting an ambulance, one will arrive, emphasized Paul Andorf, the director of MEDIC EMS of Scott County.
“It should be seamless,” Andorf said. “There’s no loss of service for anybody.”
For years, MEDIC and local government leaders have considered bringing the nonprofit emergency transportation service under the umbrella of a government entity to steady the organization’s finances as it faces higher costs and lower revenue.
In 2022, MEDIC appealed to the county and cities to make ambulance service part of local government.
County supervisors voted in April to absorb MEDIC and in August hired Andorf, a 27-year MEDIC employee, to lead the new department. His predecessor, Linda Frederiksen, will retire with the transition.
With the transition has come a lot of logistics planning.
On Jan. 1 , about 154 MEDIC employees and volunteers will become employees of or volunteers for the county, Andorf said. That’ll change employees’ health care and retirement benefits.
That number includes 26 volunteers, 16 dispatch employees, 53 paramedics, 36 EMTs, five people in the transportation division and 10 administrative staff, Andorf said.
Nineteen ambulance vehicles will transition, too, he said.
MEDIC’s contracts with area hospitals, nursing homes, and hospice centers for transports will also transition. The ambulance service contracts to transport patients to a destination — for example: delivering patients from a hospital to a nursing home.
MEDIC covers some Muscatine territory, and that coverage will remain the same, too, Andorf said.
The supervisors have approved asset transitions, mutual aid agreements and contracts in the past few months.
“Everything is status quo,” Andorf said.
What’s next?
Once Jan. 1 sails by, Andorf plans to set his sights on unlocking government funding for MEDIC.
One such program is Ground Emergency Medical Transport funding, authorized by the Iowa Legislature in 2018.
The program is administered by the Iowa Health and Human Services Department. Publicly owned or operated ambulance services can get extra payments to help cover the gap between the cost of transporting patients in emergencies and what they receive from Medicaid.
Cost reports are due annually by the end of November, according to the state’s website.
As a county department, the ambulance agency can also use the Iowa setoff program to collect a portion of tax refunds and casino and lottery winnings from people who are delinquent on their ambulance bills, Andorf said. It’s a program not available to nonprofits.
“It helps offset those expenses,” Andorf said. “Those people are usually the ones we send to collections that don’t want to pay the bill.”
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