Patients who are addicted to narcotic painkillers reveal methods to try and receive more drugs from an emergency room.
In the interview, the patient admits calling 911 and feigning chest pain. Why?
What the caller, and only the caller, knows is that his chest is not throbbing in pain. Actually, his chest is fine. What he has done is just reserve his personal medical limousine for transport to the head of the line at the area emergency room — an emergency room that may unknowingly feed his current prescription drug addiction.
The caller also knows that Lawrence County taxpayers are going to pick up the dime for the entire trip. Not a single cent is coming out of his pocket. He does not have insurance and has no intention of paying for the trip.
Indeed, statistics show for that particular area’s EMS services, 50 percent of their calls are not for true emergencies.
Although it’s true that patients often won’t know what is a true emergency or not, a growing trend is that “another chunk of the non-emergency calls [EMS] responds to comes from an underground society of prescription drug addicts who know how to beat the system and . . . taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.”
Why do they do it? Well, according to one addict, “Because more often than not, it works.”
Read the whole piece. It’s quite sobering.