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news
Smashed bike under ambulance which crashed into cyclist (Rainier Police Department)Cyclist charged $1,800 for journey to hospital… in ambulance whose driver crashed into him
A cyclist in Oregon has filed a $997,000 lawsuit against an ambulance service after he was charged $1,800 to be taken to the hospital… after the driver of the ambulance hit him and smashed his bike, leaving him with a broken nose and bruises all over his body.
71-year-old William Hoesch was cycling through Rainier in Columbia County, Oregon, in October 2022 when an ambulance driver, returning to its station after a trip and going in the same direction made a right turn onto another street, and ended up slamming into the cyclist’s side and running over his bike.
He was taken to the hospital in the same ambulance where he was treated for his fractured nose and other injuries, racking up a total of about $47,000, with him expected to pay an additional $50,000 in medical costs.
However, The Oregonian reports that the ambulance provider, Columbia River Fire & Rescue sent him a bill of $1,862 for the journey to the hospital, which has led to Hoesch filing a lawsuit worth almost a million dollars against the company.
Ambulance with the cyclist's bike under its wheel after the crash (Rainier Police Department)
According to police reports, the driver who struck Hoesch and a passenger in the ambulance estimated the ambulance was going between 2 mph and 10 mph when they heard a thump, stopped and saw Hoesch injured.
Hoesch, meanwhile, told the police that he was going somewhere between 5 mph to 10 mph and said he didn’t think the ambulance was going to turn in front of him. His bicycle was crushed under the ambulance wheel.
Attorney Travis Mayor said that the lawsuit also seeks $900,000 for pain and suffering, stating he suffered decreased range of motion, reduced grip strength and other symptoms. They also claimed that Hoesch’s uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage is obligated to cover any damages that Columbia River Fire & Rescue is unable to.
According to The Oregonian’s report, Columbia River Fire & Rescue declined to comment, while Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Co. didn’t respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time an emergency vehicle has come into conflict with a cyclist. Shocking footage from South London surfaced last year in August depicting the moment the driver of a fire engine that went through a red light as it responded to an emergency call crashed into a cyclist at a crossroads in South London. The rider sustained a head injury, which police have said is non-life threatening.
The cyclist, said to be a man in his 50s, was treated at the scene by paramedics before being taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service (LAS).
> Man gets payout after ambulance that picked him up from bike crash injures him even more
Meanwhile, in an even bizarre case from ten years ago, a mountain biker’s ambulance ride didn’t go as smoothly when he was picked up after falling head first onto a rock, and then got injured even more while inside the ambulance as the driver braked suddenly, making him the man hit his head on one of the partitions inside the vehicle.
Stephen Burns was subsequently awarded €27,700 by a court in Ireland as compensation for the additional injuries sustained by him during the “violent stop”.
Adwitiya joined road.cc in 2023 as a news writer after graduating with a masters in journalism from Cardiff University. His dissertation focused on active travel, which soon threw him into the deep end of covering everything related to the two-wheeled tool, and now cycling is as big a part of his life as guitars and football. He has previously covered local and national politics for Voice Wales, and also likes to writes about science, tech and the environment, if he can find the time. Living right next to the Taff trail in the Welsh capital, you can find him trying to tackle the brutal climbs in the valleys.
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35 comments
...and this is before Trump even takes office!
-Ambulance boss: Revenue is dropping.
-Ambulance driver: Leave it on me Boss, I have a plan.
$97,000 to fix injuries, the worst of which was apparently a broken nose. Think about that the next time you hear people slagging the NHS...
I remember reading somewhere about a couple in the US whose child was born prematurely and needed neonatal intensive care, and they ended up with (IIRC) about $1,000,000 or more of medical bills.
And this is the world-beating medical system that some of our politicians (or their puppetmasters) wanted to use to replace the NHS…
It touches every area of life, I had to miss the wedding of one of my best friends in Washington DC because the (relatively serious but not particularly high risk and very unlikely to have needed any intervention during the planned trip) medical treatment I was undergoing at the time meant that travel insurance for a four day visit cost more than return flights from London for two of us. Said friend is now an American citizen and the amount he has to pay for medical insurance for himself and his family is mind-boggling.
Funding the healthcare service is not a binary option between the NHS and whatever the hell you call the US system.
I am most familiar with Japan and Italy, both perform better than the NHS. If we can improve outcomes for patients then we should do so.
No problem: Trump's going to fix it. The same way the tories fixed the NHS, only much, much worse.
And bang on cue, from the Guardian just eight minutes ago…
I'm sceptical of predictions about what he's going to do as he's a notorious liar and his dementia seems to be gathering speed, so he could end up just spouting rubbish and not actually achieving his handlers' aims.
The papers are currently lapping up the attention that any Trump-based article will get, so worth taking their predictions with a good ladle of salt.
I wouldn't disagree but there are good reasons to believe it's true, for a start it's not something he would have to be proactive about, the subsidies that were put in place to help people during Covid expire next year and would have to be renewed; if the Republicans end up with a clean sweep of White House, Senate and the House they will have carte blanche not to renew and many senior Republicans as well as Trump have already signalled that they won't. It's all tied up with the fact that the subsidies were part of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and as is well-known Trump is exceedingly keen to demolish anything that his nemesis Obama put in place.
Yeah, at this point, I can't see much hope for the U.S. people. Trump loves stupid people and it seems like stupid people love him.
"Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good."
You beat me to it - I've just read the article and was going to post the link to it.
Every single aspect of this story - especially every single monetary figure - shows what's wrong with the American system and how lucky we are to have the NHS.
FTFY
I'm certainly glad we don't have the US system - but if we were really lucky, surely we'd have one of the continental health systems that are usually rated above the NHS?
I think the trick is to not vote in governments that are seeking to destroy the healthcare system so that they can privatise it for the enrichment of their mates and sponsors.
Not aware of many UK politicians who haven't been working for the benefit of their mates and sponsors, at least partially?
Logically, unless you were totally devoted to an ideology (also a troubling prospect) who is going to guide you? And who are you going to stiff - probably less likely your friends and those with power to help you going forward?
Best to hope is that what politicians think will keep them in power is aligned with your own benefit in some way, and hopefully sustainable.
We've got some hard choices coming because problems of success - we're all living longer and often in worse health. Plus people from much of the rest of the world think you get a better deal in eg. the UK. And through accident of history and geography we have a language which many people have some awareness of, water, fertile land and a liveable climate - which may be scarier going forward.
The entire premise behind elected representatives is that they're supposed to represent the public. When they instead put other interests ahead of the public interest, then the whole system breaks down (c.f. 14 years of Tory rule).
Not untrue - they "represent" the public, but what does that mean? The public are rather varied and may have quite different interests!
Rather than rambling further here's another outing for Douglas Adams' much funnier and not entirely flippant quip about democracy.
Yet greater private involvement in other healthcare systems has led to far better outcomes for patients.
I would assume that it's the scent of huge profits that pulls in investment that does improve treatments, but we can see the end game of privatisation by looking at the U.S. system. The major problem is when there's an effective monopoly that gets privatised (water companies, train companies etc.) and with patents on new drugs and high barrier to entry, the drug manufacturers can more or less charge what they want unless an entity such as a government can force them to have reasonable prices (c.f. insulin prices in the USA).
I would qualify your statement of "far better outcomes for patients" as mainly applying to well off people in the U.S. as they now have a whole class of people that cannot afford the insane healthcare prices and so don't become patients (and thus get missed from statistics) and instead have to avoid getting medical treatment or filling prescriptions etc. We're likely to see more of that happening if Trump guts the ACA as he has said that he will do.
The mistake is to focus on the US.
Europe and Australia have many examples of private healthcare and public healthcare complimenting each other well to deliver far better outcomes than either the US or NHS.
Competition is imperative, the NHS is a monopoly and delivers all the problems associated with a monopoly.
But the NHS was rated top of the pile fourteen years ago, when the tories took over.
NHS infiltrated by former associate/girfriend of... Jeffrey Epstein!
You might want to look at that ranking in a bit more detail.
The NHS was still awful at actually treating illnesses back then.
Look up the health outcomes part of the ranking.
That wasn't what my original post was about - it was about the NHS as it is now. If you're going to be run over by an ambulance tomorrow, there are probably better places for it.
I'd agree the NHS (and other public services) compared better to other countries' in 2010. I do recall one study which put the NHS top (www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877 - although I think others gave different results, depending on the criteria used (twas ever thus)).
It certainly shows what's wrong with the American system.
Whether we are lucky to have the next worst system is another matter.
At least with the NHS there are so few ambulances actually available that the chances of getting run over by one are much lower...
Inhumane system that now will be getting even worse.
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