I am lucky to be in the NW USA where we have an amazing lifeflight program. I gladly pay the low yearly membership. I have never needed it and when working my insurance paid 100% for emergency services. Now retired and on medicare and supplement, it is still covered completely. I still gladly pay the low yearly fee because it helps a lot of people and helps keep this amazing service to stay up with new technology. Whenever a life flight helicopter or plane flies over or an ambulance or other emergency service vehicle screams by, I stand with my right hand over my heart and wave with my left. I have total respect for these dedicated people! I am sad that someone is having a bad day, but happy that we have such an amazing quick response team. Over the years thousands have made it to the trauma hospital alive because of this service. Check your area for such and get involved. Link below to our four state service. https://www.lifeflight.org/
No, but I live in the Houston metro area and the major medical trauma center has life flight helicopters.
While medical transport by helicopter can certainly make a difference when someone needs immediate care that is not available at a nearby location, helicopter transports are more than a hundred times more dangerous than ambulance transports. The smallest mistake can result in a crash and crashes are most often fatal to everyone on board, as opposed to ambulance crashes, where the driver is most at risk. Air transports are also hugely expensive, to operate and to use. I worry sometimes that, in trying to pay the bills, patients are transported by air sometimes, when ground transport would have made more sense. There is the cost of the helicopter, the pilot, and the medics, who are paid whether or not they are in the air, so there's a temptation to put them in the air as much as possible. When helicopter medical transports first became available in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I worked, the air flight service provided only the helicopter, the pilot, and the equipment. Any EMS service or hospital wanting to avail themselves of the service had to provide the medical personnel. My only flight in a helicopter was when we were going to transport a burn victim to a burn unit in Houston. We transported the patient from the local hospital to the Brownsville airport where we met the helicopter. While the helicopter left the ground, I was hooking the patient up to the EKG and other monitoring equipment, checking IV lines, and so on, when I heard a loud pop. Then, I was aware of the pilot moving things around. I couldn't see him from my position so I didn't know what it was about. Then he said, "Hang on, we're going down!" Then we were free-falling for what seemed like a long time. I had been busy so I didn't know how high up we were. I felt the helicopter hit the tarmac, as he had ascended (to what height, I don't know) but we were still on the airport grounds. After the impact, there was a lot of noise, which turned out to be the helicopter sliding across the tarmac. When it came to a stop, the pilot said something that I couldn't understand, but I guessed it to be an instruction for us to get out of the helicopter. Clearly, we weren't going anywhere, so that made sense. When I opened the door, I could see flames at the top of the helicopter. I said, "We've got fire!" My partner and I both left the helicopter, then remembered to come back for our patient. The pilot got out, and we backed away from the helicopter. By then, the flames were pretty high. By law, the fire department had a unit stationed at the airport, but it seemed like forever before they got there. By the time they did, the helicopter was fully in flames. Fortunately, for us, the pilot had flown helicopters in Vietnam. The rotor had locked up, he said, and I don't remember what else he said had gone wrong, but the only control he had over the helicopter was that he could tilt it. So he had let it fall until just before it hit the tarmac, then tilted it so that it would slide across the tarmac, which absorbed much of the force of impact. My partner was perfectly okay. My knee must have hit something because it hurt for a few weeks, but I was otherwise okay, and our patient was fine, except for the burn, of course. We transported the patient to Houston by ground ambulance. A few years later, the first life-flight company to be based in the Rio Grande Valley went down, killing both medics, the patient, and the pilot. The scene was described similarly to the 9/11 crash in Pennsylvania, in that they couldn't even find the pieces. Particularly when you consider that helicopter medical transports are often called in to transport patients who were victims of severe weather conditions that make flying especially dangerous, being a medic for a life-flight service is a dangerous job, much more so than running Code 3 in a ground ambulance. It's also hugely expensive, and that cost is passed on the patient, whose insurance sometimes won't pick that kind of cost.
@Ken Anderson I fully support all our ground emergency services also. It is part of our emergency services package that is very low cost considering how it helps keep ambulances state of the art. So much of the northwest is areas where a response time by ground is too slow and helicopters are required. Also helicopters are used by major general hospitals sending serious burn victims to Seattle. In bad flying weather transport is by ambulance, but slick roads and mountain passes with avalanches pose a problem. Sometimes they wait for better flying conditions. Most life flight from rural areas is immediate response by ambulance, to closest emergency, then by ambulance to airport and on plane to destination airport and from there by ambulance to trauma hospital.
I don't understand the "emergency services package" thing. Here, the ambulance/EMS services are private businesses or part of the hospital system. A patient using the service is billed after using the service; there's no "annual fee."
I'll let @Faye Fox explains how it works in her area but, throughout the country, there are a lot of different organizational structures for ambulance services. Some are privately owned companies, hospital-operated ambulances, and others are operated as municipal services, county services, or operated through the fire department. Some are volunteer services, and there are also subscription services, which is probably what Faye is referring to. A subscription service may be able to offer a higher level of service than the publicly-contracted service in the area or might be able to offer a quicker response time and be more likely to have an ambulance available when needed. Another advantage might be that they are familiar with their subscribers and already have information on file that can help them determine what a problem is. I don't know whether the subscription fee pays the entire cost of any use of the service. There were no subscription services in the area where I worked, but I know that they exist. Overall, I think subscription services make up a very small percentage of the EMS services in the country. Some states require them to take calls from non-subscribers too, which goes a long way toward defeating the advantages that they might be able to offer to subscribers.
Thanks for the explanation, Ken. Our suburban area has several volunteer fire departments so I'm familiar with those.
I've never heard of it. It sounds like sort of an affordable annual fee rather than the high bill from private organizations. Sounds like a good plan. I have no idea if we have it here.
@Ken Anderson It depends where you live in the Northwest if the fire medical ambulance service that pays what ever part of the fee your insurance doesn't, is available and the cost. All the places I have lived offer the Northwest Lifeflight, however the ambulance "insurance" that pays the part your insurance doesn't may not be available and cost may vary. Ambulance services are generally city, county, or district housed and controlled, but may be private contractors. In some cases, generally rural, some property tax money may go to supplement cost. In metro areas where the ambulance "supplemental insurance" is offered it is usually to off set those that can't pay for service or to buy new technology. It is really complicated to understand. The local ambulance service I pay into, only covers from my place to the nearest hospital. It really is no benefit to me, but it helps others and keeps the ambulance service up to date, so I pay it gladly.