This is definitely not true. A base model unequipped ambulance may be in that ballpark. A fully equipped ambulance will vary wildly in cost based on clinical level but will be about $250-500k in the US.
> Then you have liability, both for the vehicle and for the medical treatment; that's about $12k per year.
Maybe for BLS or non-emergency ambulances in a low-utilisation role? For ALS/Critical Care or higher in a busy jurisdiction it's going to be significantly higher.
I tried to find the asterisk there to see the details, but could not.
FWIW I think that HEMS cost is significantly under costed, as the London HEMS H135s run about £2,500 per flight hour on direct flight costs alone, so I suspect the £4,748 figure is referring to that alone.
I think a closer estimate is probably total annual operational costs divided by total shouts, (£18 MM / 2,000) or about £9,000 per shout.
Even that's an under costing, as the clinical personnel, equipment, and liability is shouldered by the NHS. A pure costing is probably closer to 2-3X that per clinical flight.
Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.
> Only a complete moron would think the answer to this is no. If there's no personal cost to using an extremely expensive service, every one is going to use it regardless of whether it's actually necessary. It will quickly turn into a free taxi service for anyone who wants to go anywhere near a hospital.
Okay, so why don't we see this behaviour more in other countries?
In my jurisdiction, the incentives are actually weighted towards pushing people to ambulances, as there is a €100 fee for self-referral to ED which is waived if you're transported, but while there are time wasters and frequent flyers, the service is actually less abused than US ambulances under EMTALA.
Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk).
Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.
My company has several MCPs that our very token intensive, but it seems that with Claude Code, usage is throttled even before hitting limits. I don't have any proof, but often when using intensive MCPs, Claude Code will just stall for 10+ minutes.
No, current LLMs are already good enough to read the subtexts from documents, email, call transcripts where available. They're extremely good at identifying unwritten business practices, relationships, data flows, etc.
> I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated.
This is an extremely miopic view (or maybe trolling).
The vast majority of software developers never study, learn, or write any code outside of their work hours.
In contrast, almost all professional have enormous, _legally-required_ upskilling, retraining, and professional competence maintenance.
If you honestly believe that developers have anywhere near the demands (both in terms of time and cost) in staying up to date that other professions have, you are - as politely as I can - completely out-of-touch.
This is definitely not true. A base model unequipped ambulance may be in that ballpark. A fully equipped ambulance will vary wildly in cost based on clinical level but will be about $250-500k in the US.
> Then you have liability, both for the vehicle and for the medical treatment; that's about $12k per year.
Maybe for BLS or non-emergency ambulances in a low-utilisation role? For ALS/Critical Care or higher in a busy jurisdiction it's going to be significantly higher.