Are volunteers the reason?

From "A Day In The Life Of An Ambulance Driver", a blog I read, written by a guy whose outlook and writing I usually agree with and often admire: “Except, of course, that those wages come from a finite revenue pool of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement that runs about 30% less than the actual cost of providing the service. And that reimbursement was derived from some arcane formula calculating the average cost of providing EMS services across the country… including the volunteers who provide the service for free. So, thanks for doing your part to keep EMS wage levels in the toilet, Mr. Noble Volunteer.”

Ah, AD, ya got me again.  I swore to myself after the gun debacle that I wouldn’t run the risk of all the dissention by commenting, but as a volunteer with our local rescue squad for over 35 years, I gotta take you to task on this one, and run the risk of getting shot down yet again.  Volunteers are not doing what they do to bring down wages for paid services.  Volunteers are doing it because they are a necessity for both EMS and fire services.  In many areas across our country that’s all there is.  That’s all there is because given the many factors that include location, tax base, potential revenue and operating expenses make having a paid service out of the question.  And let’s not even go in to finding trained people in some of the areas, never mind keeping them trained. Then there’s the whole thing about how even if there were enough trained people to go around, would any of them want to pick up and move to the isolated areas that depend on the volunteers for whatever help they have?  We’ve got a lot of places like that here in New York State, and I know you must in Louisiana, too. Look them over and ask yourself if they’re better off without the volunteers, without any help at all, or should they wait for a paid service to arrive from an area many, many miles away – if that service would provide the coverage.  The county I live in now has five rescue squads.  Every one of them started life as part of the all volunteer fire department and eventually branched off on their own, and now we all have career staff 24/7/365.  Ours operate out of two stations to cover roughly 150 square miles.  But we thankfully still have volunteers who help those crews when things get busy. The EMS system the country knows today is founded on what volunteers provided for decades.  Please don’t put down what your predecessors did, and what thousands of us still do - yes, for no pay except the satisfaction that we’re helping our neighbors and often our own families.  For whatever reasons, we couldn’t go get the training and make it our life work.  But please don’t make us the scapegoat for what’s wrong with the system.  And don’t make it sound like getting rid of us would solve the problem.  I doubt it will, especially not in my lifetime. 

Thanks for at least reading the other side, even if you don’t agree.  I will now put on my armor and wait to be blasted with your response – and no doubt that of others.