Private ambulances wants a ban on firefighters rescuing babies

American Medical Response says Prescott Valley’s firefighters shouldn’t be allowed to operate an ambulance.

Prescott Valley, AZ is home to 150,000 people and a single private ambulance operator with the exclusive regional franchise: Lifeline Ambulance, a division of American Medical Response (AMR) — a predatory monopolist that has snapped up many smaller ambulance companies and locked in lucrative exclusivity deals with many US cities and towns.

Unlike AMR’s EMTs, the firefighters in Prescott Valley are public servants, working for the Central Arizona Fire and Medical Authority (CAFMA). AMR hates CAFMA, because CAFMA has its own, unauthorized ambulance that it uses to save lives when AMR’s penny-pinching gets in the way.

For example, last August, a 911 operator took a call about a baby that had drowned in a bathtub and wasn’t breathing. AMR’s staff said they were 12 minutes away. So CAFMA’s firefighters used their “unofficial ambulance” to transport the baby to a helicopter, and thence to a hospital. The baby lived.

AMR was livid. They narked out the firefighters to the state authority, demanding an investigation as to why the firefighters were cutting into their business.