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The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Commonwealth Fund and thank Jaime S. for his work assisting states and self-funded health plans in the development and implementation of payment policy initiatives and related health policy projects. Over the past year he has received compensation from the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Jack Keane Inc. In addition to his appointment as an affiliated scholar at the UCSF/UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science and Health Policy, Murray owns and operates a health care consulting firm, Global Health Payment LLC, specializing in the development and implementation of provider payment systems. The grant was administered by the University of California Hastings College of the Law and the Urban Institute. Robert Berenson’s and Robert Murray’s efforts in researching this topic and drafting the manuscript were funded by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund. We conclude that it is time to move discussions from whether to regulate hospital prices to determining how best to do so. Each of these proposals would require less administrative complexity and burden than other proposed approaches. This analysis challenges conventional wisdom by urging policy makers to consider regulations that limit out-of-network provider prices and establish flexible hospital budgets. Conventional US policy wisdom also holds that price regulation inevitably will fail because of excessive complexity or succumb to the interests of regulated entities. Other developed countries, however, commonly implement price regulation to support competition over important care delivery components other than prices, including quality of care and patient choice, and to provide stronger incentives for providers to improve operating efficiency. This incorrect assumption centers on the belief that robust competition in US commercial health insurance markets must include provider price competition. They are very well trained and experienced, and choosing to be transported to the hospital may lead to you waiting in A&E for a long period of time unnecessarily, as arriving by ambulance does not get you through the queue any quicker.In US health policy, conventional wisdom holds that market competition and price regulation are mutually exclusive strategies to stem high and rising provider prices. In these situations, please listen to our staff and follow their advice. In some cases you may be required to be transported to the hospital. In a non-life-threatening emergency, you may be treated by an ambulance crew or RRV. They are a member of the public, trained to provide life-saving treatment to people in their local community while waiting on an ambulance or RRV. If you live in a rural area, the first person to arrive on scene may be a Community First Responder. An ambulance may or may not arrive after the RRV, depending on whether it is needed or not. In a life-threatening emergency, an ambulance with two crew members are often expected to arrive, however, it is possible that you could be treated by a rapid response Paramedic in an RRV. A system of categories is used to do this and will place a call into life-threatening emergency and non-life-threatening emergency (or non-emergency).
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When you call, our dispatchers will ask you a series of questions to determine what response would be most appropriate for your situation.
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