Firefighter/medic and wildland fire contractor. I pull in about 15% of my base tech salary doing a few hours of work a week and one wildland fire deployment per year. It's a hobby that turned into a side profession and feels great to help people.
I've just moved to the US. Any details about how to get involved in this? What are the base requirements to work as a medic for this kind of work, would MIRA qualify?
Im a wldland firefighter from the northern Rockies, just returned from a deployment to the Woolsey incident (LA and Ventura counties).
Yes, prescribed burns are common in the off season for all fire districts. However, CalFire has some unique challenges [1] that most of the other states do not have to deal with when it comes to air quality and sufficient water conditions during their shrinking off season.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...
I'll add statistics for the 2018 fire season that includes southern and northern California [1] at a combined 55,000 acres versus the northwest (WA, OR) of a similar geographic size [2] and atmospheric conditions to Northern CA at over 100,000 acres in prescribed burns.
Unless the payload is a mass simulation, even cubesats and nanosats are "real" satellites. The customers for University satellites are typically USAFRL, NASA, or DARPA.
Small world. I remember reading your comment about vehicle fires on another thread recently, thinking "we _do_ have a lot of vehicle fires on the Interstate here, sounds like this person sees a similar high number where they live". Usually Subarus, no?
Also factor in most of those calls during the morning and evening, follow-up paperwork time, daily equipment checks, and station maintenance. If you cut the timeframe down to 12 hours busy window, that's 90 minutes per call. Throw a good call in there and they stack up. In my experience, a 24 hour shift with 8-10 calls is just about the max to handle before burnout.
Article mentions the bulk of the bill was a "trauma activation". This is an alert from the EMS units to the hospital that they are bringing a patient with indications of trauma requiring additional medical resources to be diverted. The reaction and resources differ per trauma facility. SFGH is a level 1 center [1]. There are better news sources that describe the trauma system within the context of this story.
My opinion based on limited information within the article is that the field EMS suspected a closed head injury. The trauma "doctors at the hospital quickly determined that baby Jeong Whan was fine". If the baby had an MRI instead of a medical exam by a team of specialists, the headline would lose some weight.
The fee is to staff ED specialists 24/7. I believe the better question is: "should we charge for resources that were used but stood down after initial assessment by the trauma team?" From the perspective of the EMS field, there are protocols that describe tbe patient condition, mechanism of injury and other indicators which dictate a trauma activation.
Just how many specialists were they keeping available, and how much do those specialists cost? Let's say five different preeminent medical professionals were needed to respond to that emergency. Let's say that it used an hour each of their time. That's still $1000 an hour, which is exorbitant regardless of your credentials.
And that's the most charitable evaluation. They "quickly determined that the baby was fine." So what did the hospital do, charge out the entire cost of running the ER to one unlucky family since they were the only case who was brought in that hour?
Bad comparison. Italy has far inferior health system, barely able to provide 2x better infant mortality rate at 1/3 the cost when compared to US. /sarcasm
MRI avg price is $2,611 in the US. Google it. A hospital once charged my insurance US$12,000 for a CT Scan through emergency. A CT scan costs $1K (avg based on resolution) in the US. When I pointed out the stupidity of this to my insurance (with public twitter shaming) they quickly decided to cover my copay. Robbery or what?
Any ideas on how to fix the healthcare market? The feedback loops seem to be totally broken, in more than one place. I've long wondered how they could be restored, short of government action to try to make things drastically more efficient. Unfortunately, there seem to be strong incentives for officials not to do anything, given that that inefficiency means that healthcare is a major, growing, and well distributed employer.
Improved price transparency might help, and would be a relatively easy thing to improve, but with most patients not being responsible for paying their own costs, I'm not very optimistic about that route.
"but with most patients not being responsible for paying" -- right there lays the answer and the problem. I thought about this a lot while doing my 1st healthcare startup in silicon valley and connected with many startups "disrupting healthcare through price transparency". 5 years later... None succeeded.
If one could incentivize every patient to upload their bills to an open source service that would crunch the data and spit it out anonymously online showcasing hospitals & services rendered + insurers et al.. then I think we might be on our way to true price transparency and a potential disruption in US healthcare.
I spent some time thinking about ways to incentivize patients to upload bills, you'd only need a very small fraction to get a representative sample of how much different services cost at different hospitals. I haven't come up with anything very motivating, except maybe the desire to expose how ridiculous some of them are.
Cars commonly catch on fire from electrical issues, overheating, malfunctioning or negeglected maintenance on transfer cases or transmissions. We get a car fire at least once a month. This average increases during the summer and does not count semitrucks/trailer fires.
I'm a firefighter for my county that includes ~ 30mi of interstate along a national corridor. DOT has estimated 11,000 vehicles pass through our county each day on this corridor.
Out of curiosity, how many of those would you say were cars less than a few years old? That more than anything is what catches my attention about this story — anecdotally, I’ve seen car fires on the highway, but always older cars, and a Tesla seems like it shouldn’t have had time to accrue that degree of wear and tear and deferred maintenance. But I’m curious what someone with more data points makes of it.
Wow a firefighter on HN?! Awesome. What upcoming firefighting tech excites you/seems promising? Know any interesting firefighting tech startups? What is a big problem in the firefighting space that you think tech can solve/disrupt? Thanks for your time!
The increased risk of cancer is a big downside.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/firefighters/health.html