If you didn't charge for ambulance rides the poor would abuse them and use them as taxis, laughing while hard-working law-abiding property-owning citizens would die from heart attacks because all the ambulances are busy driving irresponsible poor persons to liquor stores and drug dens.
Hellworld. How many people could be paying for this?
For the sake of argument, per the 2020 census, Wake County has ~410K households.
At $60/household, that's ~$25M to cover all households.
Accepting that cost and depending on how you calculate the population, that's $20~25 per person per year to have free ambulances.
The budget for EMS in Wake County is $74M out of a $1800M total county budget.
1% of the budget reallocated and all ambulance services are free and it would certainly be less than that at scale. Just fucking reallocate the money.
ah but you see poor people are feckless and if you gave them free ambulances they'd only spend them on drugs and booze
How could I forget about the moral hazard?
If you didn't charge for ambulance rides the poor would abuse them and use them as taxis, laughing while hard-working law-abiding property-owning citizens would die from heart attacks because all the ambulances are busy driving irresponsible poor persons to liquor stores and drug dens.