An Upper Peninsula community may face cuts to their EMS services due to non-payment from a former Michigan government contractor.
The Kinross EMS is short nearly half a million dollars and has already begun reducing daily services to save money.
The agency, which serves 650 square miles in the eastern UP, says they’re owed $460,000 by Wellpath, an insurance company that previously worked with the Michigan Department of Corrections to provide medical care to inmates.
The service receives about 2,000 service requests annually across the county, including more than 200 calls from the nearby Kinross Correctional facility.
Renee Gray, director of Kinross EMS, says that Wellpath initially reimbursed the service as expected. But around a year and a half ago, Gray says the company stopped paying out.
“It ended up being about 12 months that we were not paid for any of our transports, and with a budget our size and the size of our agency, we just can’t absorb that kind of loss,” she said.
The amount owed by Wellpath is about 11% of the service’s annual budget. Gray says the agency has had to conserve resources.
“Any reduction in our services is going to lead to a longer wait time potentially for some patients,” she said.
Angela Madden, director of the Michigan Association of Ambulance Services, says that shortfalls this large just aren’t sustainable for agencies like Kinross EMS.
“Half a million dollars is a very large amount for that agency based on their size, and it is affecting them in a way that is extremely serious to their patient population and the rest of their communities as well,” she said.
A spokesperson for Wellpath declined to comment on the situation.
A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Corrections confirmed that the state no longer works with Wellpath and its parent company Grand Prairie Healthcare Services.
They said in a statement that the groups owe subcontractors an estimated $35 million and have not been cooperative with the state’s requests for repayment.
The Department stopped working with Wellpath earlier this year and filed suit against them in September.
Madden says there are around 15 EMS agencies around the state who are dealing with similar non-payments.
“It is imperative that the state of Michigan do a supplemental budget appropriations bill to cover this debt immediately, while they go through the legal process and recoup those funds from Wellpath — there is no other way around it, or we’ll have more agencies in a situation like Kinross,” she said.