Well,,, While visiting a friend who had a head injury, a bullet, at a very intensive care facility, I asked him what all the other patients were there for. He told me, “Motorcycle accidents.” Many of them had had their insurance maxed out, and were on the public dole. That’s when I decided that helmet laws were reasonable.
>>Many of them had had their insurance maxed out, and were on the public dole.<<
And the root problem is not that they were not wearing helmets. The root problem is that they were on the public dole.
BTW, did he say none of them were wearing helmets?
Have to disagree with you. And the fedgov themselves back me up on this.
In a ten year study from 1990 to 2000, the fedgov compiled what stats they could. I think it was called the FAR study. Don’t ask what it stands for, I can’t remember any more.
Now, here’s the shocker. They found that a helmeted head injured biker cost more to hospitalize than a helmetless head injured biker. The report got buried in some vault, but I think its still available.
Now, before your knee starts twitching to a chin cracking jerk, here’s why: Helmetless riders may die. Dead is dead, dead is cheap. Helmetless head injured riders for the most part can be rehabed to some point of self sufficiency. For example, Garry Bussey. Even though they may not look so good, for example Garry Bussey.
A helmeted head injured biker most likely will live and even look pretty good, and that’s the really expensive part. The helmeted head injured biker usually sustains A CATASTROPHIC NECK INJURY THAT ENDS IN PARALYSIS that requires hospice care 24/7. Rehab is extremely rare.
The bottom line is that helmets kill and cripple on a huge scale. But because its a NECK injury and not a head injury, its swept under the rug. That’s why NTSB ran away from their own report.
This major point is why many state legislators found for repealing mandatory helmet laws.
ALSO,
NTSB, by it’s actions, are breaking a law that was passed under Bill Clinton, that prohibits them from lobbying. I guess they figure in this climate of lawless bureaucrats run amok in DC, they don’t have to follow no steenkin law.
Yes, there is another side to the coin, and sometimes it holds a dark secret.
How many of the motorcycle related patients were actually wearing a helmet when the accident happened?
If you go head first into a car, a wall, a pole (I think you get the idea here) you die, you are not a patient somewhere. When your brains leak out of your skull, you die.
I would bet that most of those patients WERE, in fact wearing helmets.
Those without helmets never made it that far.
Based on the premise that ‘we shouldn’t have to pay for their foolish decisions’, helemts should be outlawed
Were they in multivehicle accidents (got creamed by a cager or nailed by someone making a left turn in front of them (failure to yield).
Who hit them? Why weren't they carrying enough insurance to pay the bills?
Without knowing anything but the result, and not the causative agent, you propose that it is "reasonable" to impose a law on the people who are, two times out of three, the unwilling recipient of traumatic injury from some negligent automobile operator.
IF the NTSB would apply the same standards of investigation to highway accidents as they do to plane crashes, the overwhelming cause of "accidents" would be pilot error.
While helmet use might be reasonable, legislation is not.