Klamath County Fire District 3 is ending its ambulance service after district officials said the cost of providing coverage across a vast, rural area became unsustainable.
The board voted unanimously Friday to end its ambulance service because of costs. The change is expected to increase ambulance response times for residents in eastern Klamath County and pull resources from elsewhere in the county.
The district, which covers a rural region east of Sprague River, has been providing ambulance services since late 2023 and received its own ambulance license in January 2024.
The service was paid for through billing for each transport. Interim Chief Nate Hussey said many patients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, which he said reimburses the district for only about 15% of what the district bills.
"It is not a sustainable situation based on how ambulance services run in the state," Hussey said. "It's a rigged game that rural and frontier ambulance services are forced to play. There is no funding to operate an ambulance service, short of insurance billing."
The problem is compounded when crews respond to calls that don't result in a trip to the hospital because then the district can't bill for it.
"The last three months, we've had 30, 35 to 40 ambulance calls per month, but only about 20 a month of those have resulted in us transporting," Board Chair Dan Hudson said.
That means crews can spend hours responding to an emergency without generating revenue.
"We really only get paid if we deliver patients to the hospital," Hussey said. "We don't get paid for canceled calls. We don't get paid for patient refusals. We don't get paid for deceased individual calls. All of which we are trekking hundreds of miles across eastern Klamath County to get to."
While urban agencies can turn around a call in half an hour, he said, District 3 calls often take three to four hours because of the distances involved.
Hussey said ending ambulance service will shrink the district's annual budget from about $500,000 to about $150,000.
Meanwhile, he said it's difficult to attract employees because of low pay.
The district had to borrow $30,000 from the county to meet payroll this month. It's also waiting on $35,000 from the Oregon Health Authority's Ground Emergency Medical Transportation program.
Ambulance coverage in the district will now be divided among Chiloquin Fire and Rescue, Klamath County Fire District 1 and Basin Ambulance.
But they will take longer to reach District 3 residents.
Hudson said District 3 will continue responding to medical calls as first responders, but the volunteer crews will no longer be able to transport patients.
Hussey, who has spent years working on the ambulance, said he’s one of 10 people losing their jobs as the service ends.
"I staffed the ambulance a lot for the last four years. I have staffed, for the most part, that ambulance roughly 100 hours a week," he said. "For me, this is super personal. I've actually invested my life, to the detriment of my home life and my family, into trying to keep this ambulance on the road."
Fire District 3 is the fifth entity to attempt to run an ambulance in this region, Hussey said, and the only solution he sees is potentially a separate tax district for ambulance services.
"But in truth, I don't believe that Klamath County residents have the palate currently for that to be a conversation," he said.
