Med flights too risky

Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

Helicopter crews that transport injured patients from accident scenes to hospitals, and sick patients from one hospital to another, have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, The Washington Post reported in a lengthy investigative story printed Friday.

Significantly contributing to the danger, the newspaper reported, is an attitude at the Federal Aviation Administration and its parent agency, the U.S. Transportation Department, that a deregulated, unfettered air-medical industry will spur competition, which will keep prices lower for patients and insurance providers.

The Post researched this assumption and reported that it is not true. A flight can cost as much as $20,000 and Medicare alone pays out $220 million a year for patient flights.

What is true, though, is that crashes of medical helicopters have killed 211 crew members and 27 patients since 1980, while injuring many others, the Post reported. Nearly half of those statistics were recorded in the past decade as the medical flight industry experienced rapid growth.

Last year was the deadliest, with 23 crew members and five patients dying in crashes.

In researching the accident rates of other industries, the newspaper found that only working on a fishing boat is riskier than flying a medical helicopter.

A major problem is that federal regulators have “acted as partners with the industry, issuing reams of voluntary advisories with little follow-up,” the Post reported.

The situation is not dissimilar to what the Las Vegas Sun reported in its recent series that examined why so many construction workers on the Strip were dying in accidents. This newspaper disclosed that regulators with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were only loosely enforcing safety laws, a disclosure that led to major reforms and far safer workplaces for area construction workers.

A “hands-off” approach by the Transportation Department and the FAA has resulted in minimal fines against medical helicopter companies and no suspensions or license revocations in the past five years, the Post reported, even though the companies have routinely avoided vital safeguards.

If federal regulators do not take off their kid gloves and start applying proper oversight, the tragic statistics associated with medical flights in recent years will just keep growing.