Ambulance services for Medicare patients have finally been approved for payment, Fire Chief Rick Paris told Grand Coulee City Council members last week.

Paris said that a third-party billing service can go back to Jan. 1, 2009, according to Medicare sources. He stated that normally Medicare doesn’t accept billings that are more than 12 months old.

“I don’t know yet how many billings and how much this represents in money,” Paris said.

The city has been trying to get the Medicare problem solved, and before the federal agency would accept the billings it had to have its officials visit the site. In a letter earlier this year, officials said that they had come to Grand Coulee but there wasn’t anyone at city hall at the time.

Paris was informed that on a subsequent visit, all of Medicare’s concerns had been satisfied.

Meanwhile, other billings have been moving along well, and the billing company has recovered a lot of the revenue temporarily lost because the billings hadn’t been made.

Paris also reviewed a new chart for ambulance services, which the council went on to approve last Tuesday night. While some charges are increased other services are grouped together to make billings simpler, Paris explained.