I know it'll never fly, but it would be nice if there were a "taxi fee" for ambulances, maybe a fiver, charged by the hospital, that the doctors could waive if they felt like the call justified an ambulance. I'm assuming there's some handover paperwork that ambulance crews give to the hospital: this could have a checkbox "waive the fee" so the ambulance crews could waive it for lovely old ladies, and other legitimate causes. The idea isn't to collect any significant amount of money, after all. It's just to make people *think* they're going to pay, in order to cut down on those crap calls who would've taken a taxi or driven themselves, if it'd cost a fiver. But if this ever WERE implemented, I can imagine how it would be done: 1) Not a checkbox, but an entire form, including name, address, and means testing for the patient, to be filled by the ambulance crew. 2) An entire department devoted to debt collection, spending hundreds of pounds in man-hours for each fiver reclaimed. 3) Headlines like "pensioner dies, with £4.95 counted out in front of her: too poor to call ambulance!" 4) Targets set for money raised. 5) Pressure to raise fees to US levels. ... OK, maybe free is best. But still, it's a nice dream.