Ride Sharing Services Giving Medical Transport

As a regular Uber rider you hear some interesting stories. It’s obviously cheaper than a taxi and more convenient than a bus, but who would think about it as an alternative to an ambulance?

Never having had to ride in an ambulance, but of course being familiar with the cost of medical procedures and visits and prescriptions, I was still surprised by how expensive it seems to be to ride in an ambulance — something a lot of people have no choice in. But if you are not quite messed up enough to just be packed into one and sent to the hospital looking for a cheaper alternative makes sense, because it can be quite a large chunk of change.

Here’s the thing though — Uber, and it seems Lyft as well, don’t have the kind of insurance that covers the possible negative outcomes of having someone that needs hospital treatment in the back of your vehicle.

One driver told me that he had to cancel the ride and call the emergency services, and he was dealing with someone that was having a heart attack, so making the man wait is obviously not an ideal situation.

Another driver told me how he was hailed and was trying to get to his fare, gets near the person, and calls him to say he can’t get close because there is an accident, and the fare tells him that he was in the accident and is just speaking to the police officer and will be right over, so they can go to the hospital.

So now both of the ride-sharing companies have announced that they are planning to make a move to make medical transport cheaper. But it is still not medical emergency transport — it would be for medical appointments, to help reduce the number of people who don’t make it to their appointments. It is a lucrative market, but isn’t addressing this other problem that still occasionally drops in the lap of Uber drivers.

It’s definitely not a comfortable dilemma to be in — turning someone away who needs help. It’s not really great PR for the ambulance service either. But is the presence of Uber and Lyft in the medical transport market really going to drive down the cost of emergency transport? It seems like anyone else entering the market might have the opposite effect and actually result in ambulance rides costing even more, which given the way things run sometimes, probably won’t get addressed until people start suffering for it.

When private companies come in or highlight a deficit in existing services it should be a wake up call, and a sign that there is a need for an overhaul. Whenever competition comes in and steals something away from you, to some degree you are doing something wrong. A private company doing ambulance rides isn’t that far fetched, and with the current non-emergency service being HIPAA compliant, a base would be in place.

It’s interesting in a way that these companies aren’t so much disrupting the current situation as moving in to fill a gap that the established services are failing to adequately provide. Is it lack of money? Seems strange given that people are at least willing to pay a certain amount to get this service carried out, and if a private company can do it and be competitive then shouldn’t that be true of a service like the ambulance service?