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from the if-you-think-healthcare-is-expensive,-try-going-without-it dept.
A new analysis by researchers from Brown University and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation has found that nonfatal injuries in the U.S. in the year 2013 cost more than $1.8 trillion.
And nearly all injures are preventable, said Dr. Mark Zonfrillo, an associate professor at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital.
The study, led by Zonfrillo, found that in 2013 about one in 10 individuals in the U.S. was treated for an injury at a hospital, resulting in an annual cost of $1.853 trillion. The findings were published on Monday, Oct. 8, in the journal Injury Epidemiology.
Annual price tag for non-fatal injuries in the US tops $1.8 trillion
[Also Covered By]: EurekAlert
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zinho on Monday October 08 2018, @06:59PM (3 children)
So far, so good, even if it is an incomplete and somewhat distorted version of the heirarchy of hazard controls. [wikipedia.org]
This is why we can't have nice things: people who really won't choose to protect themselves or the people around them unless threatened with state-sanctioned violence. I was going to comment on how putting everyone in a padded room would keep everyone safe, too, but that doesn't seem to be where this article is taking us. They'd rather build invisible walls around us, and imprison us in a cage created by our own fear. At least they're not saying that we should stop participating in sports (extreme or otherwise) as leisure activities; hopefully they already knew that would get no traction.
Last gripe:
I guess you can put a dollar value on losing a limb, and that's 80% of the cost they're accounting for. Is this quality-of-life dollar value an industry-standard actuarial value calculation, or did the researchers make up those numbers themselves? If the latter, I can't blame them for making the number bigger to get more attention, but I have trouble taking it seriously.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @07:40PM
At my old job, they made us wear goggles while programming because (the very old director) had been around since any room with a computer was called a computer lab and you had to wear goggles whenever you were in a lab.
This was a typical PC office environment and the only chemicals were in the lunchroom and the copier machine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday October 08 2018, @08:48PM
Tulloch [wikipedia.org] spikes [gizmodo.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by splodus on Monday October 08 2018, @09:47PM
I'm old enough to remember when seat belts were made compulsory in the UK.
Most people did not wear seatbelts at the time, even when they had them in their cars. When the new law was being discussed, there was a lot of opposition to it - lots of people objected to it on principle, a few claimed that seatbelts could actually be dangerous...
The law passed, and seatbelts have saved lives ever since. I don't know why people would not wear their seatbelts until they were threatened with a punishment if they did not?
I guess we weigh the perceived risk against the immediate inconvenience? I wouldn't climb on a roof without a safety harness, cos I don't do that often and it's bloody scary every time I do! But I drive every day without incident; it's easy to disregard what would happen if I crashed the car...
We do need laws to protect us from ourselves - or more to the point, to protect us from the faults in our brains that give us an inadequate grasp of risk and consequences.