How the American Health Care System Destroys Families

>> Our craze for automobiles kills about 40,000 every year but nobody does a thing.

Actually, we do a lot. To pick one, NHTSB / DOT does quite a lot, from mandatory automobile safety standards, to improvements in road and highway design, crashworthy vehicle designs, air bags, national standards for emergency care and EMT/paramedic training, and so on.

We also spend an awful lot of money on freeway and roadway design, arguably in very inefficient ways but the purported goal is improved safety. A single flyover overpass (CA 152 to CA 156) was justified in terms of lives saved, and cost almost $35 million dollars.

http://www.vta.org/projects/152_156_improv_project/SR152_fact.pdf

One of the more dramatic and less cost-effective methods of improving survival after high speed collisions is the helicopter ambulance, which takes critically injured victims to advanced medical facilities within one hour of injury. If we simply let these multiple trauma victims die, we could save $25K to $50K in direct costs per incident plus all the medical, surgical, and rehabilitation costs which can surge into the hundreds of thousands per patient.

It's simply that people persist in distracted driving (main factor in one-third of fatal collisions), driving drunk (50% of road fatalities involve alcohol), and excessive speed which increases the severity and lethality of collisions.

See also http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2627.asp and http://www.madd.org/

Personally, I think we should require a separate "freeway license" with annual testing requirements. Make all police officers hold one, too. :)

The longer I live here, the more I want to move to Traipah. *They* have free health care. Also free housing and food (bare minimum for survival... you want more, work for it). Hell, I'd even take life as a Zedaleph! No free maintenence there, but they're all machines, they have a really low unemployment rate and really low homeless rate, and can live up to 5000 years.