My daughter was an EMT and she said the welfare class treated the ambulance as a taxi and expected to be shuttled around to the hospital in it (even for visiting another patient)! They would become outraged if told they had to take a taxi, even though they were fully reimbursed for it, unlike the average working stiff, who had to pay for his own subway or bus ride.
“Entitlements”, don’cha know.
I drove an ambulance almost 40 years ago. Same thing then, except in those days the taxi wouldn’t be paid for by welfare but the ambulance was. Consequently, we had nearly a hundred regulars who called an ambulance for transport to a medical facility. Most of them didn’t even need a stretcher, we were nothing more than a cab would have been.