MTS reducing non-emergency transport

By BEN FIELDS
The Independent

ASHLAND June 29, 2007 11:32 pm

— On Friday, Medical Transport Service made 200 trips in Boyd and Greenup counties, transporting those who can’t transport themselves to area hospitals and back.
By Monday, the company expects it will be transporting about one-third that many.
That’s because the company dropped its contract to transport patients who pay with Medicaid cards Friday evening, citing problems with a brokerage agency in eastern Kentucky.
Chuck Williams, vice president of operations for MTS, said the company is going from 15 non-emergency vans running any given day to four or five.
The Leslie, Knott, Letcher, Perry Community Action Council (LKLP) acts as a Medicaid broker for several regions of the state, paying companies like MTS for the Medicaid clients it serves.
Williams said the Community Action Council has been reducing payments for non-emergency runs in Boyd and Greenup counties continually in recent years.
“We used to get $25 to go pick up someone in a wheelchair and take them to the hospital,” he said. “Now we get $16.”
Williams said the company only receives $5 for driving from its Ashland base of operations to pick up a patient nearly 40 miles away in South Shore, and then take that patient to a Portsmouth hospital.
That’s not $5 profit after expenses, he said, it’s what the brokerage pays them for the entire trip.
“We’re losing about $65,000 to $75,000 a year,” Williams said. “They (LKLP) told us we had a contract to sign, but we’re not going to sign it.
“Come Monday, we’re not going to be making those Medicaid runs. We just can’t do it.”
Though the problem has been ongoing for some time, Williams said there was little the privately-owned transport company could do until its contract with LKLP expired.
“With that contract, it costs us $2,000 a day if we don’t make the runs,” he said.
Williams said non-emergency patients can continue to pay cash or use their medical insurance for transportation from MTS.
Meanwhile, the company’s emergency ambulance service — which includes a fleet of 16 vehicles — will not be affected, he said.
The reduction in non-emergency service is not necessarily permanent, Williams said.
“If they want to actually pay us for what we do, then we can go back to the way it was,” he said. “But they wouldn’t even meet with us about it, so I don’t know what the chances of that happening are.”
BEN FIELDS can be reached at bfields@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2651.