Borough looks to fees to meet rising ambulance costs

PALMER — Forced into hiring more full-time employees, the Mat-Su Borough’s Department of Emergency Services is seeking higher ambulance fees to cover those costs.

In January, the borough reduced work hours to 29.9 for all paid on-call responders in the borough. Many of those responders had previously worked 40 hours a week, or more, which entitled them to retirement benefits.

But those are benefits the borough says it can’t afford. Capping the number of hours responders can work was the borough’s temporary solution to the benefits problem. The long-term solution is to hire more full-time people.

“Our EMS system provides a relatively high level of clinical performance, and we rely heavily on our on-call responders,” borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan wrote in a study prepared as part of the lead-up to discussions over the 2015 budget.

He pointed out that a rate increase of 13.7 percent would more than make up for the extra money the department will need to fund the positions. Here’s how that pencils out:

• The cost of the seven new full-time paid employees comes to $951,043.

• That cost would replace some of the paid on-call positions the borough employs now, for a savings of $502,728.

• The difference between those two figures, which represents the cost the borough would have to make up with increased fees, is $448,315.

• The proposed increase would bring in $502,728.

• The surplus, then, would be $8,685.

Right now, the fees the borough charges are $690 for a “basic life support” ambulance ride, with $17 tacked on per mile.

The increase would bump that up to $800 base rate and $20 per mile. Brodigan’s report contains a chart comparing those costs to Anchorage. Right now, Anchorage charges residents $700 and non-residents $800 with an additional $12 per mile. Fairbanks is $800 and $11 per mile, LifeMed, a private ambulance service, charges $906.40 with $30.90 per mile.

Current staffing levels are broken into urban and rural ambulance response. In the urban area right now 12 medics are regular, full-time employees, and 107 are on-call. The rural service, meanwhile, employs just one full-time employee — the man overseeing the rural operation — and 78 on-call responders. The urban service accounts for 76 percent of the calls in the borough.

Brodigan’s plan looks into the future, with seven more full-time employees envisioned for the rural service in the 2016 budget. Funding for that would come with another bump in service fees, this time a 9.9 percent increase to a base rate of $835.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.