Bids to make a Muncie sector of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) were due to the city Wednesday morning.
On Aug. 1, the city of Muncie published a Request for Proposal in the Star Press asking any private EMS services to propose their services and costs to the city in a bid format. Now, the city will accept the lowest bidder for either a fire-based EMS division or on an independent contractual basis to the city.
If approved, the new EMS service would not necessarily replace Delaware County EMS, just create a Muncie section.
Last year, an ordinance was introduced that would make the Muncie Fire Department responsible for EMS calls in the city. Muncie Mayor Dennis Tyler, a former firefighter himself, said this ordinance would lead to a yearly profit of $1.2 million in comparison to the $36,000 in profit Delaware County EMS made last year.
RELATED: Muncie Fire Department introduces EMS ordinance
However, Mike Harris, a certified financial planner with 19 years of experience, was asked by Delaware County EMS if he could crunch the numbers proposed in the ordinance. He presented his findings, which included a few discrepancies at the Jan. 8 Muncie City Council meeting.
Harris said self-pay, out-of-pocket EMS services per run would make for greater profit, but only 891 runs out of 10,433 runs in 2016 were self-pay. This means around 91 percent of runs were paid by medicare, medicaid or private pay insurance.
Because of this discrepancy, the ordinance was met with hostility by members of the community and was eventually tabled at the request of Tyler. After its tabling, the ordinance expired, and no new ordinances have been introduced since then.
RELATED: Muncie EMS vote tabled until Feb. 5
“The idea for fire-based EMS for the City of Muncie is not something that I just considered recently or I took lightly," Tyler said at the meeting.
Tyler said this new ordinance would lead to better emergency response times and also correct fiscal unfairness to taxpayers.
The first group to respond to an emergency situation, Tyler said, is firefighters. They often perform early care and receive “not one penny” of compensation for their work while Delaware County EMS does, he said.
These new bids are a revitalization of the previous ordinance and could lead to a private EMS company, fire-based or not, in the city.
Jim Chriswell, who has 24 years of paramedic experience, said the introduction of a private EMS company in Muncie would complicate things. This bid, he said, would still not provide a suitable EMS service for the city.
Chriswell said Delaware County EMS had around 16,000 calls made to the company last year. He is worried a new company taking over EMS services would not provide the same level of experience and knowledge the company has had since 1977.
“Experience means everything in this field. We’ve got a lot of guys that’s over 15 to 20 years experience. That’s some of our worries with another company coming in. They’re not going to have the experience we have,” Chriswell said.
In addition to an affect on experience, Chriswell said the introduction of a private service may also alter the number of people employed at the company, response times, agreements made with other EMS services in the county and the location of the stations in Yorktown, Muncie and Ball Memorial Hospital. From the experience of his colleagues, Chriswell said private companies also have trouble keeping the work roster full due to lower pay.
“They think if you call 911 you get an ambulance and everything is going to be OK. They don’t realize the skill set difference,” he said.
Delaware County EMS has worked closely with Ball State and campus police, Chriswell said, especially during sporting events and employees of a new company may not provide the same experience in comparison to the years of experience from Delaware County EMS in this area.
“Generally in private services they have less experienced employees and less experienced employees to train the people that they get,” Chriswell said.
Chriswell said Delaware County EMS is a service meant for the community. He said private companies may require large costs and not end up making any money anyway.
A private service, he said, may charge members of the community for things that Delaware County EMS services don’t even charge in some cases like bringing diabetics to normal levels in an emergency and lift assistance for people who may be unable to move due to their size, in order to scrap as much money up as possible to try and break even.
“A company wants to make money. We’re a service; we want to serve the community," Chriswell said. "That’s what we want to do."
Chriswell said there are many questions surrounding this issue that have remained unanswered if a private company were to make its way into the city.
“Why fix something that’s not broken?” Chriswell said. “We’re not a broken service. We’re good at what we do.”
If bids come through, a company will be selected on Sept. 26.
Contact Andrew Harp with comments at adharp@bsu.edu or on Twitter @adharp24.
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