When my cousin was killed last year on the Tellico Dragon, Lifestar billed his fiance $18,000 for her taxi ride. His insurance company refused to pay on his $15,000 passenger liability policy. Are they in cahoots with Lifestar? It only costs Lifestar $3,500 expenses per flight...
Warning: Lifestar can only carry one passenger at a time...no fatties allowed.
Life-Star Membership Program
If you ride in the mountains around here and happen to crash so that you need to go to the hospital, the chances are that you will be taken out in a helicopter since the road ambulance would take too long.
I found out a bit too late that the local Lifestar service is part of a network that has an enrollment program. Basically, what ever a members insurance doesn't cover is considered paid in full when you get picked up by the med-evac. In my case, my insurance covered $250, which didn't cover the cost of the ground ambulance to the landing zone. My air bill is over $16,000! Yearly cost for the program is about $50/yr for one person, $55/yr for two people and $60/yr for 3 or more member households!
Had I been able to find this info when I was looking a couple of months before my accident, my medical bills would be $16000 less.
BTW, I am a member.........now.
The following is the contact info:
Air Evac Lifeteam (Rural areas and original member based program)
1 (800) 793-0010
www.lifeteam.net
Med-Trans (Includes UT Lifestar)
1 (866) 751-4515
www.med-trans.net
Eagle Med
1 (800) 764-3343
www.flyeaglemed.com (Kansas and Oklahoma)
Membership through any one of these is honored by the other companies
The coverage area is most of the southern and mid-eastern states from TX to TN and GA to IL. Check them out before you need to.....I wish I had been able to find this info earlier, when I was looking for it, originally.
I wonder if Lifestar pockets any of the $500,000 per body for free organ harvesting from live bodies?
"Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken. Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done. Outlined in the 2008 book 'Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,' Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation."
-CNS News, Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent, Sept 5, 2009
"Ethicists and emergency medicine experts are raising concerns over New York City's plan to dispatch the first ambulance service in the country equipped to preserve the organs of the newly deceased. They question whether the organ-preserving ambulances will create tension among EMTs who may be charged both to save lives and to preserve organs for reuse. The aim of the Rapid Organ Recovery Ambulance service, city officials say, is to buy precious time for families to decide whether they want their loved ones' organs to be donated to needy patients. New York City plans to start the service rolling within a month. And the plan, which has already received federal funding, is being eyed as a possibility by other emergency medical departments. The services provided by such ambulances -- namely, efforts to save the organs of the newly dead without direct consent -- have some concerns among some experts. 'Will raising organ donation follow pronouncement of death, or will people come to know that the organ donation ambulance has been sent, making them wonder if their relative got a full press of rescue care?' said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. 'This is called violating the dead donor rule -- no organ donation [discussion] raised prior to pronouncement of death.' Far more troubling is the idea that emergency medical personnel staffing the ambulances could be faced with a dilemma of either doing everything possible to save a patient, or acting with the chief interest of saving organs. 'If it is an ambulance for the living or the dead, you run into an ethical dilemma,' O'Brien said. 'The ambulance has an obligation to the people of their service area to go back into service after a call, as soon as possible. This sounds like they may be tied up transporting and working on literally a deceased person, and not be available for others.' Mehlman adds that some may worry whether the responders on such an ambulance would be under any pressure to stop trying to revive a patient in order to begin saving his or her organs."
—Dan Childs, ABC News Medical Unit, Ethicists Debate Ambulance for Organs - Some Worry New York City Plan Could Give Living Patients the Short Shrift, May 9, 2008
"The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251.5) Using Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million multiplied by the 14% fatality rate he used in 1994 produces an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. Using this number instead of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine 's (IOM) estimated 98,000 annual medical errors would add another 216,000 deaths, for a total of 999,936 deaths annually. Our estimated 10-year total of 7.8 million iatrogenic* deaths is more than all the casualties from all the wars fought by the US throughout its entire history. Our considerably higher figure is equivalent to six jumbo jets are falling out of the sky each day."
—Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; Dorothy Smith, PhD, Life Extension Magazine, Death by Medicine, March 2004 (plus 6-Million annual aborticides in USA - Get your abortion gift certificate for Christmas!)
"Harry Hurt, one of the world's foremost authorities on motorcycle crashes and their causes, has died. He was 81. Hurt suffered a heart attack Sunday at Pomona Valley Hospital. It was a complication of back surgery that he had a week earlier, said his eldest son, Harry Hurt III. Hurt was the principal investigator of the Hurt Report, an in-depth, on-scene investigation of 900 motorcycle accidents in Los Angeles from 1976 to 1977. Published in 1981, his groundbreaking research continues to form the basis of many of the country's motorcycle safety programs and is credited with saving countless lives. 'Harry was the acknowledged giant in motorcycle accident research,' said Jim Ouellet, one of the accident investigators for the Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures study, better known as the Hurt Report. Hurt was a lifelong motorcyclist and never had a crash, said his wife, Joan. Hurt joined the Navy toward the end of World War II, learned to fly and became a commissioned officer, but the war was over, so he never flew in combat. Hurt's expertise in vehicular safety began with aviation. He wrote 'Aerodynamics for Naval Aviators,' a flight-training textbook that continues to be standard reading for aviators and is still in print, 44 years after its initial publication."
—Susan Carpenter, Los Angleles Times Obituary, Motorcycle Safety Guru Murdered by Medical Doctors, Newspaper Censors Countersteering, December 2, 2009
Deals Gap 4-hour rescue, Part 1:
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