Eighty percent of the more than half a million air ambulance flights a year (1,300 per day) in the United States are not emergencies but are much more like routine transfers. In other words, most of the time, these helicopters are taking stabilized patients from one facility to another—just as I took nursing home patients to the hospital as a teenage ambulance driver. “Many of those trips could be done at a much lower cost with a ground ambulance,” said Frazier.
