Whats the deal with MedEvac charges out of whistler?

Shadows

Shadows

Active member
was on the glacier, got flown out. was told i wouldnt be charged for the flight. couple months later (now) i get a bill for 2400 US. They knew i wasnt a citizen but still said it would be free.

ive been flown out a few times from places and got billed for all of them. so when i was told Whistler was free i wanted to know why, but was knocked out.

so why would it be free? there was a thread on tgr i was reading that explained some stuff, but it got too long and all the answers i was gather were indecisive.

anybody got insight on this?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong anyone, but I don't believe W/B actually owns any Helos. I think they just contract the work out to Blackcomb Helicopters, Pemberton Helicopters, etc, and rents them when they need to do bombing and what not. So when you need heli rescue I think they just call in the birds and let the injured pick up the bill. It is not cheap to run Helos at all and I can't see them footing the bill for these things everytime, even if it is inbounds.

I was charged for a damn ambulance ride, so I don't really know how Whistler/Province of BC could not pay that but somehow pick up a medevac bill.
 
I was not helicoptered out, but I had to have ski patrol sled me, and an ambulance drive me to the hospital. I didn't get charged anything.
 
regardless, with $2400 worth of heli time, you could have been heli skiing for a day or 2. That seems awfully expensive for a ride down to the village, or even Vancouver.
 
yea, travel insurance would've been a sick idea.

i got charged for the ambulance too. you guys give out some real crazy drugs though.

still dont see why they say it would be free. i called up the clinic and they laughed at me, so fuck that.
 
You can still get a court order setting aside the fee if your consent was procured by a misrepresentation on the part of employees of the company... ie, you can say you wouldn't have consented to getting flown off the hill if they hadn't convinced you it'd be free. But if it was serious enough to require a heli I would think you would've wanted to pay for it anyway.
 
it wasnt life threatening - dislocation. a few drugs and a sled ride wouldve been fine. but it was spring and you had to down load so i dont know how they handle that. I was also in the understanding that the glacier is in bounds, no one said otherwise.
 
Oh. Well you can make that argument then. They can't so much as touch you without your consent or implied consent based on the standard of what a reasonable person would have agreed to. If they procured that consent by lying to you it doesn't count. Unfortunately, how you'd go about getting the fee set aside might be more of a hassle / cost than the original 2400.
 
yeah james, when i broke my collar bone they charged me $84 for the same trip to lions. mine happened 2 years earlier so you're lucky the rates went down aha.
 
all the way to lionsgate or was this at grouse?? i dont know what the whis hospital is called but thats the one i woke up in
 
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