REMEMBER, IT’S NOT “ORGANIZED” LABOR DAY
Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the working stiff.
It is not, contrary to liberal propaganda, a day to
celebrate the parasitical unions that feed off the ingenuity, sweat and
risk-taking of entrepreneurs and business owners, and especially not the union
bosses who enrich themselves at the expense of the very workers they claim to
represent.
Oh…and TODAY should be the last day of summer vacation for our
kids, not last week. Or the week before
that.
The school year should start TOMORROW at the earliest. No reason to rush kids out of the swimming pool
and off the beach. There’s plenty of
time for the teachers’ union and school bureaucrats to foul up our kids’
futures in classrooms between now and Memorial Day.
Happy Labor Day!
LV FIRE CHIEF “PULLS A CORLEONE”
If someone stuck a gun to my head and instructed me to say,
on video, that Nevada Gov. Brian
Sandoval is the most conservative governor in the country and should be
considered the best man for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I’d
really have no choice but to repeat such ridiculous words.
Like in a hostage video…or one of those North Vietnamese POW
propaganda films.
Similarly, Las Vegas Fire Chief William “Fast Willie” McDonald has been holding a gun to the head
of American Medical Response (AMR) – a private ambulance service that’s been
operating successfully in Las Vegas for decades – and two weeks ago reportedly
made AMR an offer it couldn’t refuse.
But first, some background…
AMR has been operating its private ambulance service in Las
Vegas for over fifty years. For that privilege
the company pays the city around
$400,000 a year in “franchise fees.” The company earns its money from insurance
companies and individuals for transporting people to the hospital. The fire department, by contrast, costs
taxpayers a bundle to provide the same service.
Which always reminds me of the old conservative saying that
if you can find it in the Yellow Pages, the government probably shouldn’t be
doing it.
Which brings us to a caveat: AMR provides medical transport
service for things like heart attacks from reading your property tax bill; it
does not provide rescue services – such as using the “jaws of life” to extract
a victim from their car in an auto accident.
Rescue services are not what we’re talking about.
So here’s how things worked, quite well, in the old days…
Life-Saving Race to
Your Place
Let’s say you’re having a cup of Maxwell House while reading
the morning newspaper and suffer a mild stroke after reading that the City of
Las Vegas actually wants to use millions of tax dollars to build a soccer
stadium downtown.
After quickly checking online to make sure your life
insurance is paid up, your spouse dials 911 and requests an ambulance.
The fire department takes the 911 call and dispatches both
AMR and a taxpayer-funded ambulance
to your house. That means two ambulances rush to your side, and whichever one
gets there first immediately renders aid and stabilizes you.
Now, after you’re stabilized it only makes sense that the
AMR ambulance would then transport you to the hospital so that the fire
department ambulance crew - which, unlike the AMR folks, is capable of responding
to the more serious types of rescue calls – is again available for service.
And this is where the problem lies…
Whichever ambulance actually transports you to the hospital,
that’s the service that gets to bill the insurance company. If AMR does the transport, AMR gets the
service fee. If the taxpayer-funded fire
department ambulance executes the transport, the taxpayer-funded fire
department gets the additional dough.
Enter Fast Willie
Over the years, it’s made perfect sense for AMR to handle
the bulk of hospital transports. Until
last March. After the new fire chief
came to town.
Fast Willie McDonald knows the way to San Jose - though it’s
not likely he’d be welcomed with open arms if he goes.
Just a little over a year ago Josh Koehn of
SanJoseInside.com wrote a column headlined, “San Jose Fire Chief Leaves for Las
Vegas Amid Unanswered Questions.” In it
Koehn noted that Chief McDonald announced he was leaving San Jose just three
days after announcing he was staying.
“The change of heart fits a pattern,” Koehn reported, “as
McDonald, leaving a job he started almost exactly three years ago, has rarely
stayed put for long. He’s now left fire
chief posts in Fremont, Foster City, San Mateo and Scottsdale, Ariz., an
unusual number of top-level leaps for someone just 55 years old.”
McDonald is said be a nice enough chap publicly, but one veteran
San Jose firefighter quoted in the story said, “What he portrays of himself is
absolutely the opposite of who he is behind closed doors and how he manages
people. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
McDonald’s San Jose tenure was also tainted by an “inability
to properly report response times” and included accusations of “gender and
religious discrimination, amongst other charges.” Indeed, at the time of his departure a year
ago for the greener pastures of Las Vegas, McDonald himself admitted that
morale in his department was “very low.”
Ladies and gentlemen, your NEWWWW Las Vegas fire chief!
The Emperor Strikes
Back
Under the pre-McDonald emergency medical response system,
AMR was handling roughly 70 percent of the hospital transports and the fire
department 30 percent. McDonald, intent
on swelling the amount of dough going into his taxpayer-funded department’s
coffers, radically changed that system last March.
Under the new McDonald system, 911 operators stopped giving
AMR automatic notifications of emergency calls.
Instead, fire department medics were dispatched to every call and AMR
was notified only if the fire department thought they might be needed.
Don’t call us; we’ll call you.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
Last May, Jane Ann Morrison of the Las Vegas Review-Journal
reported on a study conducted by the well-established/well-
Now why, you might ask, would the taxpayer-funded fire
department blow off emergency calls to low income areas?
Well, low income people are far less likely to have health
insurance policies that cover emergency medical transport, that’s why!
Indeed, it looks like the fire department had started
cherry-picking emergency calls in middle- and upper-income areas and sloughing
off the low-income, predominantly minority areas because it’s much harder to
collect the transport fee from poor people without insurance.
According to an RJ editorial on May 15, 2014, Applied
Analysis’ study looked at the demographics in two ZIP codes…
“In 89134, which includes Sun City Summerlin and is 81 percent white, the Fire Department took 63 percent of 182 transports, leaving AMR 37 percent. In 89110 (my ZIP code!), which is 63 percent Hispanic, the Fire Department took 17 percent of 255 hospital transports, leaving AMR 83 percent. In 89134, the payment collection rate was 45 percent. In 89110, it was 21 percent. So the Fire Department, with the support of city management and the City Council, is having AMR pay a $400,000 annual franchise fee to the city for the exclusive right to lose its shirt.”
Holy screw job, Batman!
For his part, in response to the study, Fast Willie declared
the claims “completely false” - even though he admitted that, um, he hadn’t
actually, you know, read the study.
Spoken like a true butt-covering, turf-protecting government
bureaucrat.
Is that a Horse’s
Head in Your Bed?
Then on August 20, 2014, the RJ’s Morrison reported that “Las
Vegas’ dual response system for emergency ambulances is dying.”
As such, instead of one ambulance from AMR and one ambulance
from the city rushing to your aid in an emergency, “One or the other will be
dispatched, not both.” This, according
to Morrison, “after more than a month’s negotiations between the department and
AMR.”
Apparently Scott White, AMR’s general manager, woke up one
morning with his prized stallion’s head lying next to him in a pool of blood (Google
“The Godfather”). Fast Willie appears to have made Mr. White a Corleonesque
offer he couldn’t refuse.
The “agreement” – which clearly was “agreed to” under duress
by AMR – is scheduled to be inked this week and presented to the Las Vegas City
Council. McDonald predicts the “compromise”
will result in the fire department doubling the number of calls it gets to 60
or 65 percent, while simultaneously slicing AMR’s piece of the pie in half.
In other words, the fire department, with this “agreement,” gets
the gold mine and AMR gets the shaft.
And make no mistake: This boost in fire department
transports will inevitably, down the road, lead to Fast Willie demanding
increased funding to increase the personnel and equipment necessary to handle
this increased workload. It is as
certain as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning.
So this “agreement” will ultimately not just be bad for AMR,
and not just bad for patients requiring emergency assistance, but for Las Vegas
taxpayers, as well!
As such, the best thing the Las Vegas City Council could do
at their meeting this week is reject this “agreement” and instead vote to get
the Las Vegas City Fire Department out of the hospital transport business
altogether.
Because if you can find it in the Yellow Pages…
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“The city of Las Vegas is clearly in this for the money, but
crowding out AMR ultimately would be far more expensive to the public. The fire department has only 22 ambulances,
while AMR has 69. The only way the fire
department can meet its transport goals is to soak taxpayers by adding more
ambulances…which are way more expensive than AMR’s units…and more extremely
well-compensated firefighters – while losing AMR’s franchise fee, taxes and
taxpaying jobs. Mr. McDonald has
deliberately and cynically attacked the livelihoods of men and women work
alongside his firefighters – and compromised public safety in the process.” – Las Vegas
Review-Journal editorial, 5/15/14
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