alt Hacker NewsVery much so. We could fix this. We continue to choose not to, and will for some time into the future.
Tangentially (think in systems), much of the US exists off of volunteer emergency services (fire and emt), which is rapidly evaporating. Average age of these volunteers is mid 50s.
https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/nfpa-journal/20...
> For generations, volunteers have formed the backbone of the nation’s emergency response system. Roughly half of the U.S. population, some 170 million people, live in areas primarily served by volunteer departments. Unpaid firefighters comprise more than 60 percent of all U.S. firefighters, and more than 80 percent of the country’s fire departments are either all or mostly volunteer.
https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/publications/1596
> 4.5 million people lived in an ambulance desert (AD); 2.3 million (52%) of them in rural counties. Four out of five counties (82%) had at least one AD. Rural counties were more likely to have ADs (84%) than urban counties (77%). Areas with the highest share and number of people living in ADs include the Appalachian region in the South; Western states with difficult mountainous terrain; coastal areas across the U.S.; and the rural mountainous areas of Maine, Vermont, Oregon, and Washington. Eight states had fewer than three ambulances covering every 1,000 square miles of land area (the Western states of Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, New Mexico, and Idaho; and the Midwestern states of North Dakota and South Dakota).
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I don’t think it is reasonable to expect to have ambulance coverage across the entire United States. There is a lot of land with very few people.
Choosing to live far away from others is also choosing to live far away from help.
If a service is highly variable cost dependent and is unaffordable for the average individual to pay out-of-pocket it is unaffordable for the aggregate individual as well.
There _should_ be some ambulance deserts.
There is no reason why this should be a blocker to solving the problem though. 80% of the population still lives in an urban area. You could create a system that works for the majority of the country’s population and then can figure out the rest.
We choose not to, because most consumers of ambulance services don't have to pay for it. So those of us who pay out of pocket for an ambulance, like I did ($1700 to go 3/4 of a mile last year) are a tiny minority.
> Eight states had fewer than three ambulances covering every 1,000 square miles of land area (the Western states of Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, New Mexico, and Idaho; and the Midwestern states of North Dakota and South Dakota).
There are some good points above, but I think this one is a distraction. Many of those states on that list have low ambulance densities because they have low population densities.
Have you ever driven through Wyoming or Montana? They have less than 10 people per square mile on average. There are a couple clusters of cities and then miles of empty land.
These statistics need to be based on cities, or at least have population density taken into account. It doesn't compute to set a threshold for ambulances per square mile when the population density differs so much from state to state.