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East Texas ambulance service threatens departure - Monday, March 25, 2002 Daily Sun Corsicana, Texas - East Texas Medical Center Emergency Medical Services has announced plans to suspend ambulance service in Navarro County unless city and county officials provide a$291,897 subsidy to offset low Medicare reimbursement rates. Members of the city council and commissioner's court will meet with an EfMC EMS representative today in the City Government Center to hear the facts for themselves. . Navarro County got rolled out with Dallas County for Medicare reimbursement," County Judge Alan Bristol said. "We are still a rural county, but for reimbursement rate purposes, we're not." Besides affecting the ambulance service's revenues, he said the lower- paying classification hurts the hospital, the health department, Medical Arts Clinic and local doctors in private practice. "(United States Representative) Martin Frost's office has been trying to see what they could do to get us changed back to rural because we don't have the competition to justify those lower reimbursement rates," he said. "We don't have the doctors or anything to drive the costs down." EfMC EMS is a non-profit organization which serves quite a few counties in North and East Texas, but losses in Navarro, Ellis and two other rural counties have been great enough to necessitate a subsidy request. "Basically, he's telling us that the subsidy he's asking for is not to make them profitable, but just to keep them from losing so much money," Bristol said. Since the county cannot do without ambulance service, official's options are limited by the Sept. 30 expiration of ETMC's contract. "We can find another provider which would have to come in and start