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Jun

13

Helmet Laws, Freedom, and Higher Insurance Premiums

June 13, 2008 |

The Trib Review has an article on the rise of head injuries to motorcyclists since Pennsylvania repealed its helmet laws two years ago.  The story laments the additional costs:

“Motorcycle crashes and injuries don’t just affect the person involved,” said Dr. Kristen Mertz, lead author of the report that will be published in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health. “They also affect their family, their friends, their co-workers and Pennsylvania taxpayers. Riding without a helmet is not just an individual decision.”

Mertz, a professor at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health coauthored a study with Hank Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at Pitt’s Center for Injury Research and Control, and the findings clearly showed a rise in injuries and death since the helmet law repeal: a 32% rise in head injury deaths, and a 42% rise in head injury hospitalizations, which resulted in 132% rise in head injury related hospital charges — well over double the rise in non-head injuries. (the numbers all confined to motorcycle accidents)

Here’s a KDKA news item on the same report.

Helmets do save lives and prevent injuries, there is no doubt.  (Although, as KDKA notes, there is a study that points out all deaths on motorcycles… but this is not head injury specific, leading one to contemplate if “all motorcycle deaths” would be even lower if helmets were worn.) But this is, frankly, just another problem of the socialization of costs of personal lousy choices and bad behavior.  And our philosophy here at the Three Rivers Post is such that the government intervenes far too much in the lives of adults.

That said, a better solution would be:

  1. Allow insurers to base their health insurance rates based on the insured’s behavior and lifestyle.  Actually allow them to underwrite health insurance.  Life insurance, disability insurance, and long term care insurance providers are allowed to underwrite specifically to properly charge their clients for the risks each individual brings to the overall pool of insured.  Someone who chooses to be an obese chain smoker will undoubtedly have a higher chance of earlier death and disability, and therefore will always pay a far higher premium than someone who takes care of themselves.  The same holds true for sky-divers, scuba divers, and auto racers, and even those with many speeding ticket violations — all of whom engage in risky behavior likely to shorten one’s life or cause a disability.  There is absolutely NO reason why someone should be entitled to a free ride paid by those who are far more responsible with their lives.
  2. End all entitlements to free health care.   While we may have an emotional belief that health care is different, but it is and always will be subject to the laws of basic economic gravity.  That which is given to people is taken for granted, health care included.  That includes the entitlement to having zero underwriting as noted above, but just the same, it includes the state simply forcing health providers to provide health care no matter what. The problem with the latter is twofold:
  • First, we can no more afford to offer the best health care “for free” to everyone than we can afford to offer “the best car”, “the best television” or “the best house.” Slowly socialization sucks the life out of whatever industry sector is socialized, just as it sucks the life out of any economy that is socialized. This may not rub nicely with the lovey-dovey feeling we all want to have when it comes to life, but just the same
  • Second, by subsidizing the costs, we encourage people to use what they otherwise wouldn’t, and similarly lower people’s value of the product. We constantly hear stories of welfare recipients and others riding for free going to emergency rooms for basic care, and even those with health insurance tend to abuse the use of medical treatments because they don’t perceive they’re paying for it. For others, because the costs don’t fall on their plate, they take poor care of their bodies knowing, no matter what, the bill for taking care of them will be covered by someone else.

That said, you don’t want to wear a helmet because you don’t fit the Easy Rider cool guy image?  Fine — But you’ll Pay twice the health insurance premium!  Still don’t want to wear a helmet?  Oh, yeah!  Your life insurance and disability insurance premiums go up 30%.

Of course, there are those who don’t give a sh*t bout that sort of stuff because they’re government entitlement free riders?

Fine.

No helmet wearers simply don’t get treatment when they show up with their head injuries.

That may sound really harsh — It is. But enough is enough. This nanny state baloney is bankrupting our country. These people need to be sent a message that they are accountable for their own actions, something government meddling has inoculated far too many of its citizens from for the last 100 years, resulting in a bunch of dependents at the government trough, all waiting for collectivized freedoms and wealth to be dolled out.

But why not just pass a law requiring helmets?  Isn’t that a lot easier, and then there’s no issues with head injuries not being treated at hospitals?

Well, this is a matter of principal on a far larger scale, and it has to do with the Government at all levels reaching into the freedoms of the citizens, left and right.  Everything has an exception as to why this or that freedom doesn’t matter, and why liberties must be confiscated “in just this one instance.”  But each incursion justifies yet another incursion, breaking down the collective psyche against leviathan state power.  There are literally millions of exceptions to the old constitutional premise of individual rights to consent and the extraordinary limits of the government ot infringe on that basic right.   Today the United States may have the freest of lands in many instances, but in others it is terribly regulated, run by politicians beholden to a Corporate Plutocracy that works hand in hand with a Fabian Socialist Elite.

In simple terms, your ass is owned by those in power who will leech you for every dime and right they can to aggrandize their visions of utopia, and to line their pockets with the nations’ wealth. Those who hop into line benefit (think lawyers, regulators, compliance personnel, tax and environmental consultants, and countless other experts at navigating the arbitrary, legislated minefield we live in… And then there are the many businesses who lobby for legislation to be passed to fund their ideas that won’t be touched in the free market…), while those who stick to their guns by genuine hard work lose their jobs to foreigners, get suckered by union reps, and watch their purchasing power get leeched away by a banking elite sanctioned by the same politicians for whom they loyally vote.

What does this have to do with helmet laws?  Everything!  You’ve been conditioned to allowed 1000 billion exceptions to the rule of freedom for this convenience or that, and the dominoes of freedom have fallen one after the other, and the state slowly leeches the business environment and economy of life and freedom.

Yes, our current economic crisis is the byproduct of 100 years of steady abdication of individual power to the state, banking cartels, central banks, Congress, and their masters.  One Helmet law multiplied by thousands and thousands of other “little exceptions to freedom” have made it possible.


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