From the archives: Motorcyclists’ ‘freedom’ comes at steep price for the rest of us

This column was published on February 6, 2001

I give in. You’ve convinced me. All you motorcyclists are right: I and my fellow “safety Nazis” have no right to paternalistically insist that you wear helmets. After all, you pose no more danger to me and other drivers with your brains splattered across the asphalt than with them protected inside a scuffed-up helmet.

Since my safety isn’t compromised by your personal choices, I should not require anything of you. You should have the freedom to decide for yourself whether to protect yourself.

Of course, I’m sure that you feel the same — that you should not require anything of me and my fellow car and truck drivers.

I’m sure that you are so sincere in this whole “personal freedom” and “rights” thing that you’ll join me in lobbying the Legislature to dismantle those laws that result in your putting requirements on me and the rest of society. No, I’m sure you’ll lead the lobbying effort.

Let’s start with insurance laws. If my insurance company also covers motorcyclists, when your skull goes crashing into the highway and you end up in a semi-vegetative state for the rest of your life, I have to pay for it. Yes, in some cases your premiums may be higher than mine, but they don’t come closes to covering the bills for the intensive care and surgeries needed to try to keep your brain functioning. (The cost for a funeral is much lower than hospital, not to mention lifetime, care.)

Let’s change our state insurance laws to say that insurance companies don’t have to pay for medical care for motorcycle riders who weren’t wearing a helmet when they suffered head injuries. (There’s no equal-protection problem there; you’re not being singled out. The law applies to me and everybody else in the same way it applies to you — every time we ride a motorcycle without a helmet.)

Of course the problem with the insurance law change is that you’ll still get the medical care you need, even if you’ve voided your insurance policy. And I’ll still end up having to pay for it. My tax dollars and my health insurance dollars will go to subsidize the care you receive in the hospital emergency room. A California study found that 72 percent of hospital costs for unhelmeted crash victims was covered by taxpayers; the Journal of Emergency Nursing found that 57 percent of unhelmeted crash victims listed a government program as the primary payer.

And when you get out of the emergency room unable to even think, much less walk or work or even feed yourself or go to the bathroom for yourself, your care will be picked up by Medicaid and various government programs for the disabled.

This is where preserving both your “personal freedom” and mine gets tricky. The only way to keep you from demanding that I pay for your personal choices is to write a law that requires that medical care be withheld from unhelmeted motorcyclists who can’t pay for it.

And in a civilized society, we don’t do that. We give medical care to everyone who must have it, whether they can pay for it or not.

The fact is that most “freedoms” bear a price tag that somebody else has to pick up. That somebody is usually society as a whole.

When we’re truly talking about freedoms — not simply privileges or indulgences — society is usually content to pay the price. We put up with the opinions of those with whom we disagree in order to preserve the freedom we all have to say our piece. We pay for indigent defense to ensure that everybody has the right to a fair trial. And ultimately, we pay taxes — and put our children’s lives on the line — to operate a military whose job it is to protect all of our freedoms from enemies who would take them away.

But society is sick of paying for motorcyclists’ indulgences. Since we can’t close the hospital doors to irresponsible motorcyclists, the only way to take the burden off the rest of us is for the rest of us to insist that you wear a helmet. (Seventy-eight percent of us in South Carolina want a mandatory helmet law.)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that between 1984 and 1996, the people of South Carolina had to pick up a $284 million tab to cover the costs of unhelmeted motorcyclists who crashed.

The reason the cost is so high is because motorcycles are so much more dangerous than cars. More than 80 percent of all motorcycle crashes result in injury or death to the motorcyclist.

Wearing a helmet reduces the death risk by almost one-third. More important (since you don’t want us to care whether you live or die), helmets slash the incidence of severe, serious and critical injuries by 85 percent, according to the General Accounting Office. They cut the incidence of brain injuries — the most expensive result of motorcycle crashes — by two-thirds.

After California adopted a mandatory helmet law in 1992, the taxpayers’ share of treating motorcycle-related head injuries dropped from $40 million to $24 million. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the inpatient cost dropped by an average of $15,000 per motorcycle crash victim in seven other states that adopted a similar law.

I realize that a helmet law won’t make every single motorcycle rider wear a helmet — just as speed limits don’t make everybody drive them and laws against murder don’t make everybody obey them. But there’s a big difference between a few individuals disobeying the laws, thereby forcing the rest of us to pay for their lawlessness, and having an official state policy that encourages irresponsible behavior and hands the bill to the rest of us.

This story was originally published August 1, 2015 at 2:56 PM with the headline "From the archives: Motorcyclists’ ‘freedom’ comes at steep price for the rest of us."