Comedy influencer rips California law doubling his ambulance bill after he provided proof of insurance
Comedy influencer Robby Witt is calling out California state legislators for recent laws that have added new fees and confusing insurance "discounts" to first responder services. One of these laws made it so that the bill for his young daughter’s ambulance ride became more than twice as expensive after he provided proof of insurance.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Witt slammed the lawmakers behind AB 716, a law that went into effect in California last year that gives uninsured individuals discounts on healthcare payments. It turns out that in Witt’s case, having insurance doubled the price of the ambulance bill compared to if he was not insured – the "opposite" of how he thought it should work.
"Your whole life you've been told, right? Like, you want to buy health insurance so that if something – God forbid – happens, then you will get a lower rate than if you didn't have the insurance. Like, that's what we've all been told our whole lives. And then the exact opposite happened," Witt, who has more than 580,000 TikTok followers, told Fox.
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Though he’s from the Los Angeles area, Witt also ripped the San Jose City Council for voting unanimously this week to allow its fire department to bill locals $427 for emergency medical care starting in 2026.
As a local NBC Bay Area affiliate reported, "demand for emergency medical care significantly increased after the COVID-19 pandemic -- with 911 incidents reaching all-time highs since 2022," leading to the proposal from Fire Chief Robert Sapien.
"Implementing a first responder fee will align the department with other medical care providers, helping our community to sustain critical life safety services through cost recovery from medical care payers," Sapien told the San Jose Spotlight.
With the city’s approval, San Jose’s Fire Department joins 23 other fire departments across the state that have implemented first responder fees.
Witt told Fox he disagrees with the added fees.
"We pay high taxes in CA to fund the fire departments. I don’t like the idea of turning around to nickel and dime people in their time of need. As Americans, we have always been told you pay your taxes and that goes towards police and fire, etc.," he said.
"And now you still pay your taxes, but here comes an additional bill. That doesn’t sit right," he said, adding his own advice for the government: "If the states/counties/cities could mix in a little operational efficiency with our tax dollars [they] could keep these services running without the need to go after citizens for new fees. That’s the recipe."
However, California’s statewide AB 716 law is the one that hit the young father too close to home.
Witt went viral on TikTok last month with a video depicting his phone call with a healthcare company after his daughter took an ambulance to the hospital for an allergic reaction to food.
During the clip, which has been viewed more than 30 million times, Witt detailed his confusion to a customer service member over the $600 ambulance bill somehow morphing into a $1,300 bill after he provided proof of insurance.
"We got a bill and then we realized that you guys didn’t have our insurance, so we sent you the insurance and it looks like the bill went up," Witt told the representative in the now-viral clip.
"OK, yeah, so the first thing you received, that’s a discount that you received if you’re uninsured. So, you’re not eligible for the discount since you are insured," the person on the line responded.
As the representative explained to him, Witt’s insurance paid $1,078.85 of the $2,342.14 ambulance ride, leaving him with nearly $1,300 left to pay. Had he never provided proof of insurance, California law would have capped his payment at $600.
"OK, so I’ll get cheaper healthcare if I’m uninsured?" Witt asked the rep, pointing out the ridiculousness of his situation.
As the representative explained on the call, Witt’s original bill being so low was due to the California law, which mandates that "a ground ambulance provider shall not require an uninsured patient or self-pay patient to pay an amount more than the established payment by Medi-Cal or Medicare fee-for-service amount, whichever is greater."
The father told Fox he found the reasoning behind the law problematic, noting that people could just opt out of insurance to pay less.
"My real problem, I guess, is that it's based off of insurance and why this bill wasn't written based off of income… So in fact, you could have a higher-income family than me who decides to say, you know what? We're not going to buy insurance. And now, all of a sudden, their ambulance bills are going to be cheaper, even though they're higher income."
He then called out the lawmakers who came up with it.
"And so, you know, sometimes when they go to legislate these things, I don't know if they ran out of IQ points to get it done, but it just doesn't make sense to me that you would offer discounts based on whether someone's insured and not based off of their W-2 income."
Putting the whole situation into perspective, he added, "I paid $10,000 in healthcare premiums a year, and I was worse off on an ambulance ride than if I didn't do that. So just on the ambulance ride, I should have an extra $10,000 back in my pocket, and I would have got a cheaper bill."