|
Bayville First Aid, Council Opposes MONOC "Bailout"
By Bill McLaughlin
BERKELEY - A bill sponsored by Monmouth County state Senator Ellen Karcher is stirring up a debate that has lasted more than six years.
At the crux of the matter is the Medicare reimbursement fee schedule set in 1999, which public ambulance companies claim pay too little for their services. The local service, MONOC or Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Services Corporation, is threatening to cease staffing a Lacey facility and instead dispatch emergency rigs from Lakehurst, about 10 miles away.
The extra minutes in response time could be a matter of life or death, first aiders say.
Long-time volunteer EMT Clifford Wright, representing the 60,000-member New Jersey First Aid Council, told the town council December 28 that Senate bill 2302 should not be supported. He asked for and received a resolution to that effect.
The bill amounts to a bailout of MONOC and other Advanced Life Support agencies, he said. Local first aid companies provide BLS or basic life support.
The difference, Wright explained, is that ALS rigs are rolling hospitals, able to provide medical care that most first aid rigs cannot. But the cost to the patient often exceeds medical coverage and in many cases is not needed.
"Don't get me wrong," Wright said. "They can be useful and are called in where needed. But MONOC is in dire financial trouble and they are using scare tactics that there won't be a squad available when needed."
Wright said the New Jersey Coalition for Ambulances is opposed to the bill because it benefits only one organization, MONOC.
A story in the December 28, 2006 edition of the Jersey Journal, a Hudson County newspaper, said that MONOC is threatening to scale back coverage in the new year, including halting service from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
MONOC is reimbursed $65 per trip by Medicare - not nearly enough to pay the overhead for the registered nurse and trained paramedic assigned to each rig. A MONOC executive was quoted as saying his company loses about $500 on such calls.
Service cutbacks in Kearny, Belleville and in both Monmouth and Ocean counties are part of a "Save the Paramedics" campaign by MONOC, other first aid organizations claim.
Calls to a MONOC representative were not returned as this story went to print.
| 
