My day job is an NEMT driver. That is non-emergency medical transport. It's mainly Medicaid with a small portion of private insurance that provides transportation to and from appointments for low-income and elderly.
I have clients that get rides of over 50 to 60 miles each way just to see a counselor because they like that counselor.
A trip like that costs taxpayers about $130, and if it's a wheelchair van it's more than $350. Many of these appointments are only 15 minutes long just to do a medication check to see how they're doing.
Currently, the state of Wisconsin contract just for Medicaid transport is over $65 million dollars per year.
Based on my personal experience I would say that 40% of that could be cut in an instant if they went to telemedicine.
That's just one small state.
"the federal government spends $2.7 billion annually on NEMT, according to a JAMA study, or as much as $3 billion annually, according to the Transit Cooperative Research Program, a federally-funded research entity. With roughly 103 million NEMT trips taken annually, the average trip costs somewhere between $26 and $29.
The entire country complains about our federal budget and the Obama Administration actually increase the numbers into the multi billions per year just for transportation.
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