People in need of an ambulance in Riverhead may soon be getting more than a ride to the hospital: an invoice for services rendered.
The Riverhead Town Board is exploring billing patients for emergency treatment and transportation by the Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps.
The cash-strapped town is looking to collect payments from insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, according to Supervisor Sean Walter, who brought the idea to the table.
It’s a practice already in place in many other municipalities, he said. Payments by private and government insurers for services rendered would allow the ambulance district to increase services and/or reduce taxes for residents in the district.
Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps directors met with the town board at its work session Monday afternoon to discuss the idea, which initially got a lukewarm reception by RVAC. The ambulance service is currently funded by special district property taxes and donations.
After discussing federal and state privacy laws, Town Board members agreed to issue a request for proposals for a firm to take on the billing responsibility. The Port Jefferson Ambulance Co. pays about 8 percent of its gross receipts to a billing firm, deputy town attorney Dan McCormick told the board. The ambulance company gets about 2 percent of the annual revenue, and the village gets a 90 percent share, he said.
RVAC would be billing on about 3,000 calls per year, four times the volume of Port Jefferson, longtime RVAC board member Bruce Talmage told the town board. The ambulance corps would need to hire a full-time employee to handle the task, he said. Talmage also noted the Port Jeff ambulance company believes its 2 percent share is insufficient to cover its costs.
The logistics of gathering the information needed to issue invoices was another matter of concern for the corps.
Supervisor Sean Walter said he thought the hospital should perform the function and suggested he’d condition the town’s assistance with additional parking for Peconic Bay Medical Center on the hospital’s agreement to help with obtaining and providing patient billing information.
Peconic Bay has asked the town for help with its parking shortage. Hospital administrators initially sought assistance with a parking garage to be partly funded by a new parking district. Talks have now turned to construction of new parking facilities on vacant land located on the south side of Route 58, between commercial buildings fronting the road and an existing residential subdivision. A supermarket was proposed for that location in 2009, but the plan did not go forward.
Reached for comment Monday, Peconic Bay Medical Center president Andrew Mitchell said he’d have to look at privacy law requirements to ensure the hospital could legally pass on such information to the ambulance corps’ billing contractor. If so, he said he’d favor the medical center doing whatever it could to help.
“We enjoy an excellent relationship with the Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps and we will continue to suppor them every way we can,” Mitchell said.
The plan to seek insurance and government reimbursement for ambulance services opens up the question of what to do about people who don’t have insurance. Walter said the town would send out “a very strict letter” seeking payment and leave it at that; no legal proceedings would be initiated to collect the payment, he said.
“You never want to have people not call for an ambulance because they’re afraid of the bill,” said Councilman John Dunleavy, a charter member of RVAC.
Dunleavy said he thought 85 percent of all transports would be covered by insurance, Medicaid or Medicare.
Councilman George Gabrielsen said he’d like to see data on how many people in Riverhead are not covered by insurance.
Hospital president Mitchell told RiverheadLOCAL last week Peconic Bay Medical Center provides $8 million to $10 million in uncompensated patient care every year.
Photo captions: Accident victim Spencer Shea inside an ambulance rig in September 2010 with the RVAC crew that saved his life that January. Ambulances parked in the RVAC headquarters. RiverheadLOCAL file photos by Peter Blasl.
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