Click It or Ticket

Nasor said:
I'm very, very skeptical of those numbers.
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Those are good points and you could be right. Still even a few $million annually is well worth people getting tickets to me. The principle is important too. In the past month 3 climbers have died on our nearby mountain, leaving behind 9 small children between them. It galls me that I will now pay for their upbringing (and possibly prison costs due to having no father) because people take uncovered risk in pursuit of their hobbies, leaving the public to pick up the pieces. Likely the climbers didn’t have much insurance because the families are asking for donations for the kids in the obituaries.
 
zanket: How about this - if you can't pay your own medical bills then you can be fined for not wearing a seatbelt, but anyone who has private health insurance or auto insurance that covers accident injuries can decide for themselves, since it won't cost the government anything if they're injured. Would that work for you?
 
Nasor said:
How about this - if you can't pay your own medical bills then you can be fined for not wearing a seatbelt,
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That would let someone stick the public with a $500K bill, say, in return for a $75 ticket. So that wouldn’t work for me.

but anyone who has private health insurance or auto insurance that covers accident injuries can decide for themselves, since it won't cost the government anything if they're injured. Would that work for you?
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That still has an inefficiency. There are no real individual health insurance policies today, so others’ medical bills affect your health insurance rates. Non-seatbelt wearers raise the rates of the others in the same group, and of course there are non-seatbelt wearers in every group. Many health plans today ask the insured whether they smoke, and if they say yes to the question then they pay a higher rate. That would seem to solve the problem: just have health insurance companies create separate plans for non-seatbelt wearers. Except... If a person says no to the smoking question and then gets lung cancer due to smoking then the insurance company won’t pay the claim, in which case the public gets stuck with the bill.

So in both cases I’m still paying for others’ whims. Also consider that Medicaid and Medicare are public-provided insurance; in this case the public always pays a higher cost for the non-seatbelt wearer.

What would work for me is if non-seatbelt wearers posted a bond with the public or bought separate “no seatbelt” insurance, for which they would get a sticker they could put on the back of their car. Cops would ignore cars with these stickers in enforcing the seatbelt law.
 
So do I supposedly. But you are still lumped into a default group comprised of all the individual policyholders. What they do with their lives affects your rate. If they are all obese then all of you will pay a higher rate to cover their obesity-related medical claims.
 
That is why you put a clause in there for not wearing a seatbelt. Both car and life insurance companies have them.
 
That’s true, but the public would still be on the hook if they lied to the insurance company. The car sticker would prove that they paid for the insurance. The insurance could apply to all adult occupants of the car rather than to any particular individual.
 
That’s true, but the public would still be on the hook if they lied to the insurance company.
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Well, if they aren't wearing a seatbelt... it's kinda obvious afterwards. If it isn't obvious afterwards, then the state/public didn't really loose much.
 
zanket said:
That’s true, but the public would still be on the hook if they lied to the insurance company.
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You're assuming that we couldn't just refuse to treat them...but oh well, I suppose we'll never really live in my fantasy libertarian society.
 
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