> And your response is some anecdotal story about calling an ambulance when it wasn't really needed?

I think you missed the point. My anecdote was meant to outline how the ambulance WAS really needed despite my wife not in a life threatening situation.

Back injuries are very, very, very serious. I spent a few days considering the possibility that my wife wouldn't ever walk again. If someone even suggested we took an ambulance needlessly I (and the doctors treating my wife) would have gone ballistic. I'm checking out from this thread as it's clearly effecting me emotionally.

>Do you know that many people die every year waiting for an ambulance and due to ambulance non-availability all around the world?

We're talking about Nevada, not the world.

>We're talking about Nevada, not the world.

Well, I gave examples from Boston, California, and elsewhere. And it's not like parts of Nevada fair better:

  Despite such efforts, the shortage of medical 
  professionals is so serious in the Esmeralda County town 
  of Goldfield that 32-year-old Danie Johnson and her 55- 
   year-old mom, DeEtta Sligar, run a volunteer ambulance 
  service for the town’s roughly 300 residents.

  With no medical clinic in town and the nearest hospital 
  more than 110 miles away in Bishop, California, Johnson, 
  Sligar, two other EMTs and four drivers spend hours at a 
  time ferrying ill residents across the border. They 
  receive $132,058 a year from the county to keep their 
  ambulance and an old backup running.

That's par for the course for rural places everywhere. But ambulance shortages are there even in the biggest of cities (it's matter of state recourses and proportion of ambulances and medical pros to the population, not an absolute matter of population size).

It's not a shortage of ambulances but more an issue of not having any hospital in a 100 miles radius.

The article says life or limb. You keep taking out limb and talking about your wife’s back. That seems dishonest to me at best.

It's not dishonest, it's just irrelevant.

If your friend fell off a ladder and hurt his/her back in a way that prevented them from moving, what would you do? The chances are that you don't know how to assess that injury. It's prudent for you to call 911 and have an EMT and/or Paramedic assess and make the call on the next action.

It's different if you are a doctor, working at a factory, and have an injured employee brought to your infirmary.

Read the article again, focus on the part about Stephon Nelson.

And his point is that "Limb threatening" covers back injuries as well. You're being disingenuous implying that your situation was the sort of thing which the Doctor was advocating not using an ambulance for when he's said nothing of the sort

The problem is a shortage of EMTs, not that people are abusing the system and calling ambulances for no reason.

Given bounded resources, there might always be a "shortage of EMTs". Some rural places for example don't have the funds to even support one (and an a couple of emergency situations can peak demand even in bigger cities).

The shortage might be at the root of the problem, but it also might be unavoidable. It's not always a given that a shortage can be fixed (or when it will be fixed). And given a shortage, people who call ambulances for no reason (which very much exist) make things worse.