Hello! Can someone please help me to review my essay below, and provide tips for improvement:
The argument claims that the town of West Cambria should disband its existing volunteer ambulance service and hire a commercial ambulance service to replace it. The desired objectives of this plan would be not only to provide better patient care for accident victims, but also to increase West Cambria’s revenue. The author makes several flawed assumptions in coming to this conclusion, and therefore this argument is unsubstantiated by its accompanying premises.
Firstly, the author assumes that the difference in response times between West Cambria and East Cambria’s ambulance services are due to their commercial and volunteer nature, respectively, but provides no evidence to support this claim. Indeed, it could be the case that there are other factors in West Cambria that increase an ambulance’s response time, and that these factors would persist even if the author’s plan was adopted. For example, if West Cambria has far fewer hospitals in its main city center, where majority of its residents live, compared to East Cambria, then simply switching a volunteer ambulance service for a commercial one would not resolve the issue. Similarly, if West Cambria has twice as much traffic as East Cambria, then it is possible that the difference in response times is due to traffic, rather than the ambulance services themselves. Therefore, in making the assumption that the difference in response times is due to the ambulance service’s volunteer nature, the argument ignores the very real possibility that it could be due to another factors that would not be addressed by the proposed plan.
Another misguided assumption made by the author is that the service fees collected for ambulance use in West Cambria would be significantly greater than the cost of hiring a commercial ambulance service. Of course, if the ambulance service were to cost much more than the service fees that the town is able to raise, then the town’s revenue would not increase. This is very much a possibility, considering that West Cambria currently has a volunteer ambulance service. Thus, it is possible that the town’s residents would not be able to afford substantial service fees and minimal revenue would be raised from implementing them. As a result, one of the two key objectives of the plan would not be met, and therefore the conclusion would be weakened.
In conclusion, the claim made in West Cambria’s newspaper relies on flawed assumptions, which, when analyzed, reveal the weak nature of the conclusion. Due to the reasons mentioned above, it is a very real possibility that both objectives of the proposed plan – providing better patient care and raising revenue by collecting service fees for ambulance use – are not achieved. Given that West Cambria’s higher response times could be due to a variety of other factors, such as fewer hospitals or higher traffic, knowing the response times of West Cambria’s volunteer ambulance service when operating in East Cambria would be helpful in evaluating the argument. Such data would control for the differences between the two towns, and isolate the differences between the volunteer and commercial ambulance services. Moreover, a poll of how much residents would be willing to pay in ambulance service fees would help to substantiate the claim that a commercial ambulance service would help to raise revenue for the town of West Cambria.