How much do you charge?

[Godfatherems]

Thanks for the information. I've been in this field for 5 years now and I have a friend that wants to start up the company. I'm just getting as much info as possible for him. Plus he's rich and is paying me to do this. Easy money on my end. Take care and be safe out there.

[JPINFV]

Just wondering, can you be a little more specific than "Southern California." That's a large area with big differences between how each county runs the local EMS.

[Godfatherems]

He wants to run in Victorville area and in the Orange County area. He wants me to operate it but I'm not able to right now becuase I'm in the Paramedic program. Any info would be great.

[Novisen]

All you have to pay for in the Swedish system is about 40 dollars when you visit your doctor and abot 20 dollars for every night you spend in hospital. We dont have charges in the EMS.

[Amhet1]

Oh, so much fodder for a long verbose rant.... but i wont.....

"Starting an ambulance company in Southern California. Anyone able to help me in what i should be charging for BLS service? having trouble finding info online. Any help would be great! Thanks."

Option 1 is getting a big board, and throwing a dart at it and wherever it lands is what you can charge.

Option 2 is see what other services are charging and figure out the estimated workload. From there you should be able to estimate a ballpark rate. From there calculate the cost of providing the service with vehicles, eqipment, staff, etc. From there you can calculate what the base rate would need to be based on your estimated workload. You also have to figure out if you want to do billing in-house, or outsource.

Option 3 is estimated workload, payor mix and ballpark distances loaded. Figure out Medicare reimbursement and see if its really even feasable.

Now back to the original reason for the topic.... What service A charges really has no bearing on what service B charges. The variables are so diverse that it would take a few pages to chronicle. An FD may charge $800, a volunteer service may charge $0. Both services may serve the same demographic and geographic area separated only by a governmental line on a map.

(New tangent) A service can charge whatever they want to charge. This charge has absolutely no correlation to what they are reimbursed. The person above may decide to charge $800 for a BLS transport but in all actuality may find that when they get reimbursed, it will be more like $241 (or whatever the current rate Medicare is allowing. The drawback to $0 charge is that was part of the calculation used by Medicare to set reimbursement rates for EMS. Instead of looking at the average of the bills they get, they got figures from an array of services and pulled an average outa their collective butts and said "suck it up".

[butterfly]

our company charges and initual charge and then so much a mile. but we take what the insurance company pays and than what is left will bill the pt and they pay what they can.

[Scaramedic]

Depends what she wants. A simple escort service is a $100 for 4 hrs. If she wants to go back to her room it's a $200/hr plus $25 per orga...

Oh wait, your talking about on the ambulance. Sorry. :oops:

[Arctickat]

$220.00

$2.20/km

$40.00 / half hour waitng time.

[rock_shoes]

It's now an $85.00 flat fee in BC. This includes ground and air crews with no mileage charge. There is of course an entirely different fee schedule for people from out of province. If I remember correctly ground crews are somewhere in the 5-600 dollar range. You don't even want to know what air-evac costs for people from out of province. Better mortgage the house.

[medicmole]

In BC, fees for patients not covered by MSP and for employers when an employee is injured at work are $530 per trip for ground transport, $2,746 per hour for helicopter transport, and $7 per statute mile for fixed-wing transport.