I have always been of the belief that someone with enough time and knowledge could travel completely across the United States all by calling 911. Would this be illegal? Perhaps. Would this prove a point that abuse on our system is out of control? Absolutely. Is anyone actually going to attempt this? Probably not.

To pull off such a project would require some serious homework on the front-end but it could be done. You would have to plan a route based on hospital locations and ambulance service areas. For the most part, you could probably get where you needed by using the old “patient choice” routine and demanding that you be taken to the furthest possible hospital.

You might run into some problems once you hit rural areas with only 1 hospital. However I would imagine that you could pull the cardiac chest pain card to be transported to the closest cardiac facility. Hell this tactic could buy you nearly 100 miles a whack.

Here are some of the bigger hurdles that you probably face:

• Crossing state lines.
• Traveling across large areas with little to no population.
• Leaving big cities.

I would imagine that you would have to plan your route carefully to avoid getting transported to a large metropolitan area. For example, if you made it to my town, you would be hard pressed to get an ambulance crew that would take you outside of our metro response area. It would violate transport protocols and take us out of our area. Now if you were in one of our rural communities that we serve, you could go pretty much any direction you wanted.

Crossing state lines could be hard but not impossible. I do know of several areas in California that transport to Nevada hospitals so I would imagine that it wouldn’t be too different in other areas.

I think the biggest problem would be hitting areas like Texas, Arizona or New Mexico where there are really long stretches of road without any sign of civilization outside of the interstate. This would require some carefully planned routing to avoid getting stuck in these areas. Then again, just hit your head on something and pretend that you had a loss of consciousness. I’m sure you could find some yahoo to launch a helicopter for you. I hear trauma centers have the best lunches.

By the time you reached your final destination, I would imagine that you would have real medical issues to be addressed. After all, spending months on ambulance gurneys would probably leave you in a wheelchair and eating all that hospital food would most likely cause kidney failure, GI issues or maybe even high blood pressure. If you did happen to survive the trip, you might as well just hop the next plane to Europe because you are never going to pay off all those medical bills. On second thought, nobody else pays them.

It would be interesting to see if this would actually work. Of course I don’t ever want to take an ambulance out of their area and possibly deny the service to someone in need, so I would never encourage anyone to attempt this. It would be a fun project to actually do the homework and plan the route. Leave the trip to everyones imagination.

I bet this would make a pretty cool movie.