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Elisabeth Yoder’s son, Darragh, was 15 months old in August when he developed what at first looked to his parents like hand, foot, and mouth disease. The common generally clears up in less than a week, but Darragh’s condition worsened over several days. His skin turned bright red. Blisters gave way to skin peeling off his face.

An online search of his symptoms suggested he had a serious bacterial infection. Yoder drove the toddler from their home in the small town of Mechanicsburg, Ohio, to the Mercy Health hospital in nearby Urbana.

Staff in the emergency room there quickly confirmed that Darragh had scalded skin syndrome and said he needed to be taken by a private company’s ambulance to Dayton Children’s, a hospital about 40 miles away.

“I asked them: ‘Can I take him? Can I drive him?’” Yoder said. “And they were like, ‘Oh, absolutely not.’”

So, Yoder and her son got into the ambulance, with Darragh strapped in his car seat. The ambulance driver didn’t turn on the siren or drive particularly fast, Yoder said. The trip took about 40 minutes, she said. “It was fairly straightforward transportation from Point A to Point B.”

Yoder had heard that ambulance rides can be pricey. But she didn’t know how much her son’s ride would cost.

Darragh was hospitalized for three days and recovered from the illness.

Then the bill came.

The Medical Procedure

During the ride, the ambulance crew monitored Darragh’s vitals and an intravenous line, inserted at the hospital, carrying fluids and antibiotics, but he received no other medical treatment, Yoder said.

The Final Bill

$9,250, which included a “base rate” charge of $6,600 for a “specialty care transport” and a mileage fee of $2,340, calculated at $60 for each of the ride’s 39 miles. It also included $250 for use of an intravenous infusion pump and $60 for monitoring Darragh’s blood oxygen.

The Problem: No Insurance, Few Protections

The children’s hospital charged only about $3,000 more for the toddler’s three-day stay than the ambulance company charged for the ride, Yoder said.

Darragh’s family doesn’t have health insurance, leaving them on the hook for the full charges. Their income is a bit too high for them to qualify for Medicaid, the public health program that covers low-income residents, or for the Ohio Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers moderate-income kids.

The Yoders belong to a Christian health care sharing ministry, with members paying into a fund that helps reimburse them for medical bills.

Unlike health insurance, such arrangements do not offer members negotiated rates with ambulance companies or other medical providers. And there are no state or federal billing protections that would help an uninsured patient in Ohio with a ground ambulance bill.

The federal No Surprises Act protects those with insurance from large bills for air ambulance transportation provided outside their insurers’ network agreements. But by the law — and even if they were, that wouldn’t have helped the Yoders, since they didn’t have insurance.

Patricia Kelmar, the senior director of health care campaigns , a national advocacy group, said ambulance charges vary widely. She said she’s seen per-mile charges ranging from less than $30 to more than $80, as well as base rates that differ dramatically.

Some patients, such as those with traumatic injuries, need ambulances with highly trained staff and advanced medical equipment, Kelmar said, so it makes sense that those rides would be more expensive. But patients rarely are told what the ride will cost until they receive a bill.

Jennifer Robinson, a spokesperson for Mercy Health, said she couldn’t comment on a specific patient’s case but said the staff follows established medical standards. “When a patient requires a higher level of treatment, ambulance transfer between facilities is best practice to ensure appropriate care,” she said in an email to �������ýҕ�l Health News.

Kimberly Godden, a vice president for the ambulance company, Superior Ambulance Service, said a doctor at the first hospital requested a high-level transport for the patient, requiring specially trained staff.

“Our priority is always to ensure patients receive the highest-quality care when they need it most, and we respond to every call regardless of a patient’s ability to pay,” Godden said in an email. “Superior had the team and resources available to quickly and safely move the patient to the higher level of care they needed within the time frame set by the ordering physician.”

Godden said the company would offer a “charity care” rate to Yoder if the family qualified for it.

The Resolution

Yoder said she repeatedly discussed the bill with ambulance company representatives, including the option for charity care. They told Yoder the best deal they could offer was to reduce the total by about 40%, to $5,600, if the family paid it in a lump sum, she said.

After months of discussion, the family wound up agreeing to that deal, Yoder said. They put the charge on a new credit card, which gave them 17 months to pay it off with no interest.

They have agreed to payment plans with the two hospitals, which offered charity care discounts that dropped the bills to a total of about $6,800.

The Yoders expect the sharing ministry to reimburse them for about 75% of the payments they’re making to the hospitals and the ambulance service.

The Takeaway

Patients and their families should feel comfortable asking hospital staffers whether a recommended ambulance company is in their insurance network and how much the ride to another location will cost, said Kelmar, a national expert on such bills. “Shouldn’t the hospital know that?” she said. “I don’t think it’s that heavy of a lift.”

Kelmar said she doesn’t want to discourage people from taking an ambulance if a doctor says it’s necessary. Once consumers receive a bill for the service, she said, they often can negotiate the price down. It can help to look up what the ambulance service accepts as payment from government programs. Those rates are often much lower than the full-price charges patients see on a bill.

If the family had been covered by Ohio’s Medicaid program, the ambulance service would have been paid much less than it charged the Yoders. The public health program pays ambulance services for “specialty care transports,” plus $5.05 per mile. Those rates would have added up to $609.95 for the transportation part of Darragh’s ambulance ride.

Yoder said she wishes she had driven Darragh straight to the children’s hospital. If she had skipped the local ER, she said, they would have arrived at the bigger hospital sooner and she would have saved thousands of dollars.

But she didn’t feel as if she had a choice about putting her son in the ambulance, she said. The doctor told her it was necessary, and the hospital staff had already inserted an intravenous line. “I wasn’t going to pull out his IV line and just leave,” she said.

Yoder said she remains uninsured because she hasn’t seen any private insurance options that suit her family’s circumstances. No matter who pays the ambulance bill, she thinks the charges were much too high. She understands that patients can often negotiate discounts, she said, “but you shouldn’t have to work so hard for it.”

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