BY: Roger Rapoport
mlive.com
Shortly after a brand new helmet saved Muskegon County Commissioner Bob Scolnik from a potentially fatal motorcycle accident last June on U.S. 31, he received a visit from his friend Dan Silberman. For Dan and his wife Betty, the accident gave them new ammunition to use with their 53-year-old son Mark, an experienced motorcyclist in Jacksonville, Fla.
Unlike Michigan, Florida does not have a mandatory helmet law. “I sure wish they did,” said Dan in a phone interview from Jacksonville on the eve of Muskegon’s Bike Time. “We’d been trying for years to convince Mark to wear a helmet.”
Last February, while the Silbermans were vacationing in Florida, Mark fell off his motorcycle on a clear evening at a speed of only 35 miles per hour. Unlike Scolnik, who recently celebrated a full recovery by hosting 75 friends at the Cherokee for the launch of the “Bob Scolnik Chilli Omelet,” Silberman was incoherent for four days and hospitalized for two and a half months with a traumatic head injury. After surgeons set his broken bones, Silberman slowly improved and now gets around with a walker and a wheelchair. His employer, the post office, has given him a two-year medical leave.
The Silbermans, who hope to return to Muskegon next month after more than six months of caring for their son, would very much like to see Gov. Rick Snyder veto a new bill (SB291) passed by the Michigan Senate that makes helmets optional for motorcyclists who buy $100,000 worth of supplemental insurance. Muskegon County Sen. Goeff Hansen, R-Hart, voted no. The House still needs to act on the proposal.
“If he’d worn a helmet like Bob,” Dan said, “he wouldn’t have had a head injury.” Mark Silberman, now a convert to his parent’s point of view, agreed: “All motorcyclists should be required to wear helmets.”
American Bikers Aiming Toward Education (ABATE) disagrees with the Silbermans and Scolnik who contend that “outright lies used by safety-crats” have created a myth, “Helmets may reduce some types of injuries or they may intensify the severity of injuries.”
Michigan legislators who support this point of view need to have their heads examined. They are encouraging a dangerous trend that has seen motorcycle helmet use drop from 67 percent two years ago to only 54 percent in 2010.
A call for universal mandatory motorcycle helmet laws is firmly in place on the National Transportation Safety Board’s most wanted list. Because many motorcyclists lack private health insurance, the public ends up paying a disproportionate share of their hospital bills for serious accidents. AAA Michigan, where 90 percent of members oppose repealing the state’s helmet law, points out that motorcyclists paid in just 1.9 percent of assessments to the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association. This insurance surcharge did not cover the cost of 712 motorcycle accidents which consumed 5 percent of funds paid out.
Will the proposal to require bareheaded motorcyclists to buy $100,000 in extra insurance coverage pay for the cost of accidents like Silberman’s? Not likely says the state Office of Highway Safety Planning, which calculates that making helmets optional would lead to at least 30 more motorcycle deaths and 127 disabling accidents per year at a cost of $129 million to Michigan residents.
“In today’s world,” Scolnik said, “$100,000 could be a down payment on medical costs for a serious motorcycle accident. It can cost $60,000 for the emergency room and initial critical care treatment.
“In Mark Silberman’s case the six figure cost of treatment to date has not been fully reimbursed by insurance. And for riders who don’t have disability coverage, lost wages can be devastating.
“This is being portrayed as an individual rights issue,” Scolnick said, “but it’s really not any different that being required to wear a seat belt. I see riders in other states with their hair flying around. I don’t think it’s fair to the rest of us to pick up the tab for a long-term injury.”
Now headed for the House of Representatives and ultimately the governor’s desk, this repeal is wrongheaded and threatens the lives of its diehard advocates. Among them was the late ABATE motorcyclist Philip Contos who joined a mandatory helmet law protest rally in Onondaga, N.Y., earlier this month. Contos lost control of his Harley and flipped over his handlebars in a fatal accident. A state trooper at the scene said he would have survived to lobby another day if only he’d been wearing a helmet.
Roger Rapoport is producer of the forthcoming feature film “Waterwalk” being shot in Muskegon. He has spent much of the past year visiting states that do not have mandatory motorcycle helmet laws.
Look up the word unalienable. No one can separate these rights from a U.S. citizen for ANY reason. The fact that Government has seen fit, (by being bought and paid for by lobbyists), to defer from the Declaration of Independence on this and many other issues involving The Peoples right to decide for themselves how best to live THEIR life, does not make it any less the law of the land.
Its really just a matter of Liberty. Either your for it, or your against it.
Its really just a matter of Liberty. Either your for it, or your against it.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."