First, this thread is not against seat belt laws! I was hoping the SD could confirm one piece of the argument just as I recall it. Besides saving lives, the seat belt laws were, IIRC, to save the taxpayers money.
If this was one argument, how was it costing the States/public money? Was it the degree of injuries (and thus compensation paid) to uninsured motorists? Could insured motorists seek money from the State, too? Or, was it more that, perhaps, HMOs had a vested interest in seeing a seat belt law pass? And/or, was there something else?
I would like to know what the SD recalls about this as aspect in the history of bringing about seat belt laws.
IIRC the notion was that not wearing your seatbelt put you at higher risk, which in turn meant insurance companies paid out more and subsequently had to charge higher premiums. So not wearing your seatbelt (from an actuarial sort of POV) drove up your neighbor’s premiums. Not exactly tax money but I guess it does theoretically come out of the other guy’s pocket.
A friend of mine claimed this was a conspiracy. At that time the Saturn car company was nascent and they were shopping around for a site to build a factory. They didn’t want to have to put airbags in their cars, since it would make them less competitive (i.e. it would cost more to put them in, which would be passed on to consumers, yadda). So as they shopped for a site, they made noises about how they hoped to find a state that was friendly to seatbelt laws. State after state whored after the money, hoping to be chosen. Eventually the law caught momentum and was passed in most states.
From the taxpayer perspective, Joe Lowpayjob crashes his car into a telephone pole. He is not wearing a seatbelt and firmly plants his cranium into the steering wheel scrambling his brains. After a couple of months in the hospital, partially paid through Medicaid (taxpayer $$$) and his auto insurance (higher premiums for us), Joe is placed in an assisted living facility. The balance of Joe’s hospital bill is considered uncollectible, the hospital passes these costs onto other patients and/or insurance companies. Once again, we pay more for our care and other pay more by paying higher insurance premiums. The assisted living facility collects Joe’s monthly SSD check ($$$) as payment for his care, this covers about half of the actual costs to take care of Joe. The assisted living facility uses the other costs to take care of Joe as tax deductions, other tax payers pay more taxes to cover these deductions. Over a 10 years period these cost could easily exceed a million dollars, all subsidised by the rest of us with higher taxes, premiums and other expenses. The so called benefit of Joe scrambling his brains, mostly payroll taxes paid by those that take care of him, hardly touches his cost to society. Had Joe been wearing his seatbelt, he spends a few hours in a hospital ER and continues on being a somewhat productive member of society.
Besides seat belt laws, lawmakers have also passed other laws to help us from ourselves. Mandatory auto insurance, auto supplemental restraint systems and helmet laws for motorcyclists are other examples.
Like all conspiracy theories, this has fatal factual errors.
Lyndon Johnson signed legislation in 1964 mandating seat belts in new cars. Rear seat belt installation was mandated a few years later.
Your deluded friend is probably confusing something that happened later. New York State passed the first state law mandated the wearing of seatbelts in 1984. Saturn as a company was announced in 1985, although the first cars didn’t appear until 1990.
Mandatory seat belt laws exist in about half the states today. That doesn’t have a thing to do with manufacturing, though. Saturn had absolutely no choice about putting in seat belts no matter where they sited the plant.
And they had no choice about air bags either. Driver’s side air bags became mandatory through a 1984 law, requiring that all cars built after 1989 include them.
Not a single fact correct. A perfect conspiracy theory. I’m sure your friend will believe it forever. I hope you no longer do.
I remember the day it went into effect in Illinois. In the paper, there was a bit in about a woman calling the police dept to report that her seatbelts had been stolen sometime “between 1974 and last night.” :dubious: :smack: :rolleyes:
Watching some movie not long ago, I got a blast from the past. Remember how we used to clip the belt for storage up at the headliner?
Yeah, I know they were required to put in seatbelts for a long time. Actually 49/50 of the states require it according to this:
And re: mandatory airbags, Wikipedia sez (bolding mine):
On July 11, 1984, the U.S. government required cars being produced after April 1, 1989 to have driver’s side air bags or automatic seat belts (the automatic seat belt was a technology, now discarded, that “forced” motorists to wear seatbelts). Airbag introduction was stimulated by the U.S. DOT.[11] However, airbags were not mandatory on light trucks until 1995.[citation needed]
I had a 1995 Ford Tempo with the automatic belt system, but I can’t remember if it had airbags or not.
All this isn’t to say I bought into the conspiracy theory…it’s just a historical footnote and I wondered if anybody else had heard it.
I remember the argument you describe as it was costing the state money in Medicaid funds to treat poor people in accidents. I also remember ads saying that if your state passed a seat belt law, then your insurance premium would go down by XXX% per year.
To date, New Hampshire is the only state without an adult seat belt law. The other states are split between primary enforcement (where simply not wearing a seat belt in enough for an officer to pull you over and cite you) and secondary enforcement (where you must be first stopped for another offense, like speeding, before you can be cited for the seat belt infraction).
A few years back, I worked at the Minnesota State Health & Humans Services Department. They operated several State Hospitals around the state. Most of the patients would be there for the rest of their lives, and nearly all them were paid for directly by Minnesota taxpayers.
Visiting at one of them, the had a whole wing treating people with TBI – Traumatic Brain Injury. These ranged from people with mild brain disorders (similar to early Alzheimer’s) to completely semi-conscious ‘vegetative’ state.
The workers nicknamed that wing the “Harley Davidson ward”, because so many of the patients were motorcycle riders without helmets who got in an accident. (It was rather disturbing to see healthy young men, barely out of their teens, who would now be severely disabled & mentally unaware for the remainder of their lives.)
IIRC, the exact wording of the law was that car makers had to install automatic seatbelts or airbags if a majority of states didn’t enact manditory seatbelt laws by a specified date. That didn’t happen, so we got the automatic seatbelts (which nearly everyone hated) followed by the airbags.
Using seatbelts in cars was pioneered by Volvo, IIRC.
In addition, early Saturns had passive restraint shoulder straps – a mechanism that moved the shoulder strap into position when the car was started, whether you wore your seat belt or not. If they wanted to cut corners, that certainly wasn’t the way to do it.
Saturn at the time used safety as a marketing tool, and was more than happy to include safety devices.
Minor nitpick: I’m under the impression that mandatory car insurances are not there to protect you (i.e., the mandatorily insured person) from yourself, but the rest of the world from yourself. Car drivers can cause enormous damage to third parties, whether they are drivers themselves or not, and mandatory insurance laws are there to make sure there are solvent debtors to pay the bill.
:dubious: :smack: :rolleyes: