Emergency services will start feeling a strain on their budgets as the federal shutdown lingers, potentially leading to services being scaled back, ambulance service providers and associations warn.
Ambulance services have been able to receive a boost in payments under Medicare, as long as Congress kept renewing the authority to do so. This includes a 2% increase in base rate for ambulance services in urban areas, a 3% boost for the services in rural areas, and a 22.6% increase for services in “super rural” regions.
But Congress has repeatedly failed to agree over government spending, and this authority was ...