How many of those ambulance uses are of fairly old people? A lot of motor accidents occur for a fairly young cohort, so I’m not sure this is a great comparison. Still, the basic point seems strong.
Yeah, the first thing I thought was to compare QALYs rather than number of lives, too. But then I thought that ambulances are more useful for ‘sudden’ emergencies such as accidents than for ‘slower’ ones such as cancer, and then maybe a higher fraction of ‘lives saved by ambulances’ are young, otherwise healthy people than apparently obvious.
Yeah, the first thing I thought was to compare QALYs rather than number of lives, too. But then I thought that ambulances are more useful for ‘sudden’ emergencies such as accidents than for ‘slower’ ones such as cancer, and then maybe a higher fraction of ‘lives saved by ambulances’ are young, otherwise healthy people than apparently obvious.