Paying for the ambulance

is something I would expect to do. My health cover allows for two trips a year. It is also possible to buy further insurance.

We had the further insurance for the Senior Cat. It is just as well we had that because it was used, more than once. 

But before the last state election there was a big campaign by the ambulance staff. They were demanding that "ramping be fixed". There were messages scrawled all over ambulances demanding this. There were protests. They got a lot of media attention with their demands. And they refused to bill the patients. The service would be "free" until their demands were met.

It was of course all a ploy to get the now government elected. They went quiet, very quiet, after that. The problems are not fixed, if anything they are worse than before. And now the ambulance service is trying to get the money they should have got from patients at the time.  

Now yes, if you use a service like that you should pay for it if you can. The ambulance personnel who were here for the Senior Cat were, with one exception, kind and caring and efficient. On one occasion one of those involved stopped me in the shopping centre a week or so later and asked,"How's your dad doing?" Out of all the situations they had dealt with in between this person remembered the Senior Cat and seemed to genuinely want to know. We would have been happy to pay for the service.

But the tactics the ambulance union was using had nothing to do with patient care. They were only concerned with winning an election. At the aged-care residence one of them saw me looking at the graffiti on the waiting ambulance. He told me, "I don't like all this stuff but we've been told we have to do it." Yes, I imagine they were left with little choice. 

There would have been some who would have been keen to join in the action, others who were less keen but still supported some action. I wonder though about the billing issue. We are now almost a year away from the last of the action and it is now that people are suddenly getting bills. Those bills are big too. People who believed they would not have to pay are now being expected to quickly find the money.

If the ambulance union had been running an honest campaign which was genuinely designed to support the members and improve the service it might well be that people would sigh and think, "I knew it was too good to be true" and then pay. But the campaign was not about that and people have known this for months. Questions have been raised about it before now. The new government has so far done nothing about the situation while still finding time and money for other and much less important purposes.

Perhaps the editorial this morning suggesting that the bills should be paid from union funds is not so unreasonable after all?