Word: amr
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...March afternoon in 1997. Though an ambulance operated by American Medical Response arrived promptly, the EMTs on the scene allegedly didn't take King's vital signs or recognize his internal bleeding. They kicked him out of the ambulance and drove off, according to a lawsuit filed against AMR. Relatives took King to the hospital, but he died there a few hours later. The company declined to comment, but two of its EMTs were fined and put on probation...
...King incident may be an extreme example, but it is symptomatic of service changes in the ambulance industry--all of them bad, say consumer advocates--wrought by a combination of managed care, Medicare and privatization. A handful of negligence lawsuits have been filed in Connecticut against AMR, the nation's largest private ambulance corps. Cobbled together out of more than 200 mom-and-pop firms, AMR has built a $1 billion-a-year business providing ambulance service to an increasing number of communities that outsource their...
...idea is that private companies can provide services more efficiently than governments and that a large corporation is more efficient than hundreds of smaller ones. In the past year, though, AMR has been attacked in states from Connecticut and Georgia to Colorado for lagging response times, shoddy service and putting the profit motive first. After a series in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant last year exposed glaring lapses in AMR's service record, Connecticut's attorney general tried to inject a dose of healthy competition, forcing AMR to sell some ambulances and give up some contracts...
...AMR's chief operating officer, Greg Guckes, argues that much of the criticism comes from public EMSs, which feel threatened by such a large challenger. The company makes no more mistakes than any of its peers, he claims, but gets more attention because of its size. "I would put our record against any company's--public, private or volunteer," says Guckes...
...start of many a mundane task. Suicide defies the holiest precepts of Islam, and for Egyptians it brings unthinkable shame to family and nation. "You can't jump to conclusions from someone quoting the Koran and say this was more than an accident," declared Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa...