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Comment by hurryer | Hacker News Reader

Why do you care if they don't wear helmets?

Because if they suffer a serious injury they are going to drain hospital resources from people who did not cause their own disease/injury, possibly become a permanent disabled person on the public dole, and in general raise the cost of health care.

You can make this point about a lot of activities, sports, drinking, smoking, drugs, eating too much.

And a helmet doesn't prevent broken bones, spines, so they will still drain hospital resources.

This is far less likely in a world where people don’t use their cars to drive 2 minutes to the grocery store.

It’s not quite that simple. Helmets are deterrents - Melbourne is a fantastic example where cycling is less common than it should be and public bike schemes keep failing specifically because of the requirement to wear a helmet. Companies like Lime try to solve this by attaching a helmet to the scooter. 90% of the time the helmet is missing. Yeah I could spend 30 minutes walking to every scooter in the area trying to find one I can ride legally, or I can just get an Uber.

When people are deterred, they take less eco friendly forms of transport, and are less active. This has negative health consequences, although difficult to measure and compare. But it’s not black and white.

The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with public healthcare and no helmets. So I don’t buy the argument that this is truly a problem for healthcare.

> The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with public healthcare and no helmets.

Yes and no. The Netherlands is seeing some second-order effects of this:

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/16/more-traffic-deaths-in...

Eastern Europe. My sister works at ER and they are calling cyclists without helmets "organ donor wannabes". The point is that unlike bikers, many of these cyclists don't end up as organ donors and/or "fatality" in statistics. They only manage to cause permanent damage to their head/brain.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but people who work in ER have skewed opinions because they’re only dealing with the people who end up with serious injuries.

You need to look at the bigger picture - first of all what’s the probability of having an accident, then within that probability what’s the difference between wearing a helmet or not. That then needs to be compared against the risks of staying sedentary. It’s complicated.

Of course the have their biases, but they actually only ones who see the cases mostly not covered in statistics and they are the ones who can say whether helmet would save someone or not. The problem is that our culture is biased against fatalities. Even in this discussion there are mostly links to graphs about death rates. But these people in ER are the ones who see a lot of cases where death would be better outcome. Looking at my neighbours taking care of almost completely paralyzed son (accident not related to transport), I tend to agree.

Imo it's the opposite))) a helmet can protect from fatal injuries, meaning hospital does not need to treat the rest if the person dies. Having a helmet means less chances to die bc of head injury but more chances hospital will treat your broken bones. Anyway, helmet helps only for light accidents, with most car accidents ppl will die regardless, there are even some stats that with car accidents a helmet somehow gives green light to autodrivers to drive more aggressively

Helmets prevent a particular type of injury - traumatic brain injury This is true for all types of transportation including driving.

Traumatic brain injury is a common outcome of an automobile collisions - yet we don't see people with the same concern for introducing mandatory helmets in day-to-day driving.

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