Chauffeur ambulances drain funds (2nd article)

"My wife is about to have a baby. We need you to come over here." Within seconds of the 119 emergency call, a three-member ambulance crew was alerted and then dispatched to the caller's home in Tokyo.
But upon arrival, the crew didn't find a hysterical wife in labor with an equally hysterical husband at her side. Instead, a very calm couple was waiting at their door, overnight bags in hand.

"The due date is tomorrow," the husband cheerily explained. "Her labor pains haven't started yet, so we'd like you to get us to the hospital tonight."

And so the ambulance crew duly chauffeured the couple to the hospital.

"Well that was fun," said the wife as she disembarked from the vehicle at the end of the journey. "These ambulances really are spacious inside." And with that, the couple entered the hospital, not even bothering to thank the crew for the free lift.

This "emergency call," believe it not, was fairly typical. In the Tokyo metropolitan region, more than 90 percent of calls for ambulance assistance are for nonemergencies, according to statistics from the city's fire department. Ambulance crews find themselves spending the bulk of their shifts with such unnecessary tasks as escorting home salarymen too drunk to walk or kids with sprained wrists, rather than dealing with life-threatening injuries.
Shukan Post figures the same trend exists throughout the country -- in 2003, ambulances were dispatched 4.8 million times.
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Maintaining a squadron of ambulances is an expensive business. The price of each fully equipped vehicle runs to around 200 million yen. The costs of employing a three-member crew for each one are even more astronomical.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government puts the cost of each ambulance dispatch in the city at around 45,000 yen.

So does the math: With 660,000 dispatches a year, more than 90 percent of which are unnecessary, taxpayers' money is being squandered annually to the tune of 25 billion yen a year -- and that's just in Tokyo. Yet unless the national habit of dialing for ambulances for less than serious situations can broken, the waste will continue.
Make the count. If 90% of the 4,8 million nationwide dispatches were for nonemergencies, like in Tokyo, the cost of unnecessary dispatches would amount to 200 billion yen per year in wasted tax-payers money. The problem is that ambulances are free and people tend to abuse as they have little idea that each dispatch cost the nation 45,000yen.

Considering that the average salary (based on the GDP per capita) in Japan is about 3 million yen a year, and that the equivalent tax rate is 10%, each citizen pays in average 300,000yen in taxes on salary each year. 200 billion yen of wasted tax equals to about 666,000 people whose total taxes are wasted in chauffeuring drunk salarymen home or other nonemergencies.

I think there should be penalties for calling an ambulance for a non emergency. Or there should be a pick-up service for elderly people who can't walk for their weekly or monthly visit to the hospital and can't afford a taxi. That pick-up service would be a minibus taking all the nonemergency patients to the hospital, without all the equipment and crew of a regular ambulance, so as to reduce costs. This service could even be charged at a reasonable rate (like public transportation), and heavier penalties (eg. 10,000yen) should then be imposed on those who try to abuse the free emergency ambulance service.