Motorcycle Helmet Law - The Cost of Personal Freedom (Part 2)
Submitted by GPH on Mon, 2010-06-07 12:07
This is Part 2 of the post on the motorcycle helmet law.
Click Here to read Part 1
So, if there is overwhelming evidence that helmets do save lives, why is there so much controversy about it? Why do only a handful of states have mandatory helmet laws?
Obviously, the law would not have been repealed without strong support from the anti-helmet advocacy groups. There are several arguments that have been presented as a reason for why not to wear a helmet.
Helmets can decrease peripheral vision and hearing. Helmets can exacerbate cervical injuries due to the added weight of the helmet. And the most important one – helmet laws violate individual rights and infringe on personal freedom.
Several studies have shown that helmets do, indeed, decrease peripheral vision by approximately 20%. This reduction, however, is small and was shown to have no impact on motorcycle safety or collision rates.
In terms of the increased rate of cervical spine injury the evidence is somewhat contradictory. Some studies found no increased rate of spine injury. Other studies have shown an increased rate of cervical spine injury, yet there was no difference of the spinal cord injury. As far as I am concerned, cervical spine injury is a fixable problem as long as the brain and the spinal cord are intact.
So, if there are proven benefits of wearing a helmet and no real reasons to not to, why there is still so much disagreement about it? At the end of the day it all comes down to individual rights and personal freedom. If somebody prefers to live on the edge and take the chance of a severe head injury in a motorcycle wreck – why not let them?
And that is where the quandary begins. It is an individual right to not wear a helmet that becomes a burden to society of caring for this individual after the accident. A study conducted by the American College of Surgeons showed that more unhelmeted trauma patients have no medical insurance than trauma patients wearing a helmet (29% vs. 21%).
The same study showed a significantly higher resource utilization use with the unhelmeted trauma patients. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most healthcare expenses for the head injured patients occur later during the rehabilitation and placement phases of their recovery. Many patients remain permanently disabled and never return to gainful employment.
If the patient has no insurance, it becomes the taxpayer’s responsibility to provide funding for the long term medical care. Even for insured patients, the tremendous cost of caring for the chronically disabled head injured patient reflects in higher insurance premiums and overall healthcare costs. The individual choice of ignoring personal safety becomes a burden for society.
There is a flip side of this issue, though. If I was a lobbyist for the helmet-free group, I would focus not on the technical reasons for not wearing a helmet but on the social ones. The healthcare expenses for providing care for the head injured patients after motorcycle accidents is a drop in a bucket when compared to more common “lifestyle related” conditions.
You can easily enforce the helmet law, yet you cannot write a ticket for smoking, fast food binging, not exercising or not taking your medications.
Conditions like COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), congestive heart failure, and heart diseases are the big ticket items on the healthcare spending menu. Those are the things that could bankrupt Medicare. If smoking and abusing one’s body is considered a personal freedom, not wearing a helmet might not be much different…
You should be careful about choosing a business. After all, investing in an entrepreneurial venture can make or break you. It can ruin or make your reputation, place a big dent on your bank account or enlarge it and do something to your self-esteem that a therapist cannot. So when faced with an online business opportunity, should you make a go for it or should you run in the opposite direction? Here, we try to make sense of what makes a good online business opportunity and how you can decide for yourself if it's right for you:
Online means just that.
A unique characteristic of online businesses is that they offer the logistical and geographical advantage that more traditional forms of businesses can't. If you're selling health supplements door-to-door, for example, you will be severely limited by your ability to physically cover an area. If there's a potentially big client in another state, you will have to pack up and travel just to meet with them and present your samples.
With an online business, you virtually have the world at the end of your cursor key. Regardless of where your clients are, you can reach them, communicate with them and close a potentially lucrative deal.
However, the very nature of online businesses makes them vulnerable to unscrupulous practices, fraud and hoaxes. If you're not careful, it would be easy to fall for false promises of instant wealth. Think about it: if all these promises were true, we'd all be living like the Donald and Paris Hilton. This is why you'll have to be well informed about the risks of grabbing an online business opportunity you have no prior knowledge of.
Protect yourself.
Never sign up for an online business opportunity that you do not fully understand. So what if your best friend has signed up and is bragging about his thousand-dollar-a-day earnings? It might be different for you.
Instead of signing your soul and bank account away, ask for proof. If the business is legitimate, they should be able to provide you with documentation that they do indeed offer a real opportunity. If there are claims to a specific income for members, ask who these members are or at least how many of them achieved that income and what the overall percentage of top earning members is. Your right to complete information is protected by the law, so use it.
Get claims and promises in writing.
Of course, no business opportunity can guarantee 100% success. There is no such thing as a fool-proof venture. Whether you succeed or not will depend on a lot of factors, such as your ability to sell, the type of market you have, trends, the relevance of the business, the quality of your products and the strength of your competitors, among others.
If the company offering you the opportunity claims a certain amount of earnings, have it in writing. It must be backed up, particularly if the business will cost you $500 or more. Always ask for the information about the earnings as part of your information pack. It's not a guarantee of how much you yourself will earn but it will show you how much income you could potentially generate.
Take your time to study the agreement.
Certain online businesses should have a disclosure document. If you buy into a franchise, for example, the law stipulates that this document be provided to you. This will outline important information about the company and whether or not it has had problems about litigations in the past. Get in touch with other franchisees to learn more about the business. Again, it's your right to know.
When in doubt
Consult someone, preferably a disinterested party. If the investment capital is considerable, talk with an accountant,longchamp bags, lawyer or a business coach. Don't be forced into buying an online business opportunity just because high-pressure tactics are being used on you. It's your money, your effort and your future you have to secure.
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