HEALTH CARE CRASH COURSE

Leave it to the guy who sees the blood and guts in the emergency room to spell out mortality in visceral terms. The BDN’s intrepid health columnist, Dr. Erik Steele, recently urged lawmakers to pass a four-part safety bill that will save lives and save money. The next Legislature would be mistaken to turn down a chance to do either.

Dr. Steele’s proposal will really irritate part of the driving public, but it should gladden a much larger portion, such as those who think safety matters more than the number of phone messages a driver returns between Augusta and Bangor. He would make the failure to wear a seat belt a reason for a police officer to pull someone over; require motorcyclists to wear helmets; require children and teens 16 and under to wear bicycle helmets while riding; and ban cell phone use while driving.

As he detailed in a column July 6, 200 Mainers are killed on the roads each year and thousands are injured. That is a tragic loss of life, causing immense and needless suffering – and an added cost to the health care budget. A study of Maine roads estimates that from 1995-2001, 850 people here could have avoided being hospitalized and saved more than $20 million if they and the people they were riding with were wearing seat belts.

Maine, it is worth noting, has one of the lower rates of seat-belt use in the country. Unhelmeted motorcyclists who suffer head injuries have longer hospital stays compared with helmeted riders – nine days vs. four days – and more than twice the hospital costs, $33,400 vs. $14,600.

There’s more: A study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded bicycle helmets reduce head injury by as much as 85 percent; a national advocacy group says the direct costs of injuries due to not using helmets are approximately $81 million annually, and indirect costs, $2.3 billion. Drivers who use cell phone, as has been widely reported, have an accident rate similar to that of drunk drivers (though headsets may reduce this and the phones themselves have been used to save lives by reporting accidents).

Almost all hospital costs are borne either by insurance, for which you pay, or by state and federal taxes, ditto. Dr. Steele, a staff member of several hospital emergency rooms in the region, observes of his four-point plan, “It is always argued that such proposals infringe on personal freedom, and decisions such as motorcycle helmet use should be left to the individual. True, but they are small intrusions into areas already regulated, and exchanges for larger freedoms gained. The freedom of a person to go unhelmeted or unbelted infringes all our freedoms by spending our health care dollars unnecessarily.”

Lawmakers know a lot of these statistics already. But without the public pushing them to act, they will not, and more lives and millions more dollars will be squandered.