It is a bad situation for sure.....but when you crash helicopters as frequently as some Operators do....you have to find a way to pay for them.
Add in the numbers of un-neccessary helicopter transports and the industry really does look bad.
When Hospitals were willing to underwrite some of the helicopter costs in trade for the expensive healthcare procedures that tended to follow intake....the cost to the patient for the transport was pretty reasonable even if not cheap.
Now with non-hospital based services cropping up with cheap singles and the need to keep the revenue flowing....bad things happen and costs go up.
My State did not operate any EMS aircraft but did tightly control the numbers and types of operations that would be accredited and licensed within the State.
We remain a free capitalist economy pretty much....and prefer government to stick to that business they are allowed by law to get into....and wish they were involved less in less than they are pretty much.
Discussions of changes jn the American way of Healthcare and Health Insurance....two distinctly different things....should we see a shift in control of Congress and the White House does not bode well at all for any of us.
The move is on again by one party to go to a Single Payer System, move 200 Million People into the our Medicare system (now thought to be bankrupt in as few as eight years as it is now without any changes) and about 31 Trillion (with a T) additional cost over Ten Years alone.....and you can see we are headed for a genuine crisis that makes the current situation look almost "Good".
We have far too many States, too large a Federal Government tangled web of Bureaucracies, too powerful a group of special interests and too many legislators on the local, state, and federal level with open palms to see a good and judicious outcome I am afraid.