PANAMA CITY — Unpaid bills for county ambulance rides will be sent to delinquent collection service 60 days sooner than they have been, the Bay County Commission decided Tuesday.
Commssioners made the decision after listening to a report on the latest collection numbers for the county’s ambulance service, which shows it to be a money-losing proposition when a “cash-in, cash-out” analysis is done.
Bay County Budget Director Ashley Stukey said this analysis shows the county is expected to lose $740,407 this fiscal year on the ambulance service and has lost almost $2 million the last fiscal year. But the latter figure includes not only operational but capital expenditures the county made to get the service up and running.
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The commission voted to have the bills go to a delinquent accounts collector after 120 days instead of the current 180-day time frame.
Under current provisions, a collection agency known as Intermedix handles collections for the first 180 days after invoices for ambulance rides are sent out, which can take a couple of months before they end up in a person’s mailbox. If the company gets no response from the customer in that time frame, the company sends the bills to the delinquent accounts vendor, Credit Business Services Inc., which can put unpaid bills on a person’s credit.
Intermedix earns 4.5 percent of the unpaid bills it collects; CBS is paid 21 percent.
County Commissioner Mike Thomas said the service is not in “as bad of shape as it looks like it is.”
“We’re losing less each month,” he said. “I know at the end of the day this will probably will never pay for itself. We need to decide what level of service we want.”
Commission Chairman Guy Tunnell said the service looks close to breaking even. “They have done an excellent job,” he said.
Bay County Clerk of Court Bill Kinsaul said when a different budget analysis is done of the ambulance service — one that factors in anticipated unpaid bills the county eventually will collect — the ambulance service actually isn’t losing money.
“You are pretty much treading water with this,” he said. “You are breaking even.”
However, he said the county’s losses likely will increase as the county soon begins to pay off principal on a loan it took out to purchase the system and when the county has to buy equipment and vehicles.
“You are probably in the best shape you are going to be [financially] now,” he said. “It is going to start trending downward.”
Mark Bowen, chief of emergency services, said the ambulance service should make about $11,000 a month that it hasn’t yet started collecting from the Veterans Affairs for rides for veterans. He said the VA acknowledges it owes the county more than $300,000 for those rides, but it could take a few years to get the payment from the agency, which pays in lump sum amounts rather than monthly or quarterly.
Thomas said he wanted to know the shortest period of time it would take to identify people from whom it’s difficult to get a payment. After that, the county might want to put those bills in collection even sooner, perhaps 30 to 90 days after the invoice is sent out, Thomas said. He said the county has not been as aggressive as it could be collecting these bills for political reasons.
“None of us wanted to have a heavy hand on this,” he said.
Commissioners said a potential downside would be the county being required to pay a 21.5 percent payment to the delinquent collector as opposed to the 4.5 percent Intermedix rate.
“I’m not in a hurry to pay anyone 21 percent,” Commissioner Bill Dozier said.
Commissioner George Gainer questioned why county paramedics after transporting a patient can’t verify a person has insurance, and if not, ask them or a family member to write a check to pay for the service.
Bowen said paramedics try to do that, but it is not their primary mission.
“Our goal is to save lives. That has to be primary issue we deal with,” he said.
Tunnell said “philosophically, I have a problem with our (paramedics) being bill collectors.”
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Just after midnight Oct. 1, 2013, the county took over operation of Bay County’s ambulance service. The county could subsidize the service with a tax like many other counties, or try to convince a private firm to take it over, county officials said. Bowen said just about every other city or county ambulance service in Florida is supported by a tax subsidy to some degree.
Thomas said he has concerns about privatizing the service.
“If you privatize the service they would have to cut (services) significantly,” Thomas said.