In the UK maybe, but in the US you should expect higher bills for _ground_ transport. Like literally, the linked story is about $12K bill for short distance ground transportation not involving any complex procedures. The cases I vaguely remember did include long lists of medical codes.
I do vaguely remember seeing some bills with such figures. I've been literally developing various OCR and medical coding crap to process the cases and I've seen plenty of real cases. Some cases had eye-popping bills attached, yes.
The $500K spike was some sort of a highway accident response, can't recall any additional details apart from some serious head/brain trauma.
Keep in mind that everything gets significantly inflated, x2 multiplier is guaranteed, x5 is likely, x10 is not uncommon. Again, from what I can remember.
Also keep in mind that billed != settled. If I recall correct, that bill was settled at something around $55K. That was many years ago.
Well, you don't know how rotten the industry is.
Your moral social-darwinism just enriches a couple of suits, nothing more, instead of spreading the costs you could very well start by making sure the costs are not inflated.
x2..x5 multiplier is always applied to any ambulance bill as far as I'm aware. I worked in that industry.
I worked at a company which was doing medical billing for ambulances among other things.
Essentially, the bills are always inflated so when the settlement comes the providers get 20..50%. The crucial procedure is so called "medical coding" where medical notes (sometimes - scrawled on paper with a pencil) are being turned into bills - and that's where additional codes are getting added and more expensive codes are selected. There are books and guidelines on how to do the coding and some automated logic which "fixes" filled forms to bump the amounts a bit.
If the insurance (less frequently - the patient) pays more - that's just a bonus.
Billing itself gets a small fraction of the bill usually amounting to $20..50, they don't profit from inflated bills directly but the clients would select you on the basis of average settlements. Dispatchers also get little fractions. Things are very different when it comes to helicopter ambulances, where the bill could easily get to hundreds of thousands and everyone involved gets a lot. In fact, all the operators prefer to work with helicopters because of that, everyone involved references ground operations as "crap" or so.
Can't say for whole industry but that's what I've seen at one particular place working with several providers/dispatcher companies.
From what I can remember about the ground reality, a $12K bill would mean that they expected to actually get $3..4K.
A typical ground bill for some particular region the company operated at was settled at $500..$2K while an average helicopter bill was smth around $200K if I remember correctly, with spikes up to $500K.
Hm, do you ever go over 1gbit? If my understanding is correct, good affordable routers like Mikrotik's CCR2004 are fully closed, so the only option is to build your own shitty box which will be much less energy efficient than their specialized switch chips.
Irish model is similar (shared ducts, backbone networks which are mandated to provide connectivity to ISPs, including competitors). But Irish market is shit. All is done over pppoe, hard to get fair dual-stack, assymetric shaping (5gbit down, 50mbit up), hidden 10tb/month limits, etc.
Good for you. That doesn't necessarily mean your experience is representative enough though.
Unifi stronk. Noone needs working ipv6 or 2+ gigabit pppoe throughput and many other things, like an ability to assign a name to an entry in embedded radius server.
Chips? I've tried to task Opus, Gemini and Codex with a simple PCB. All of them placed holes correctly but can't understand that the traces should not cross physically.