How New Zealand handles road accidents, etc

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Friends,

I recently interacted with a volunteer, at an eco-friendly workshop place, who is a pysiotherapist from New Zealand, and has practiced for some years in countries like USA too (and seen some stark differences!). She had something interesting to share about the divergent direction which her home country took in healthcare > accidents that happen in public places like on roads. I haven't taken the trouble of cross-checking since I trusted my friend well enough.. a big part of her job is rehabilitating accident victims. Interestingly, she observed that her counterparts in US tended to (and were encouraged to) advise surgery for even the kinds of sprains etc that only needed some physiotherapy.

NZ decided not to follow the US model of litigation and individualized insurance coverage (wherein the parties involved in, say, a car crash, jostle it out to figure out who was to blame and must pay for damages and healing).
Rather, they separated blame-game from relief and rehabilitation. The government itself covers the costs in case of any accident. Priority is on getting treatment to the affected asap and not allowing insurance, money matters get in the way.
What effect has this had? Well, now that they have to pay up every time an accident happens, the government's finance heads now have a direct incentive to make sure that accidents do not happen. I'll write this again.

The government has a direct incentive to make sure that accidents do not happen.

And to top it off, the government also has an incentive to pay for real ways of healing accident victims, as opposed to the expensive-surgery-for-everything approach seen in the US.
So it is devoting full energy in tweaking infrastructure design to prevent accidents from happening, and paying for propaganda to get citizens to drive safely, etc.

In contrast, in a private insurance+litigation environment, the medical industry (including government hospitals) only stands to profit from accidents, have it in their best interests to advise the most expensive treatments, and apart from the moral factor, there isn't really much to drive accident prevention.

So which of these two ways of handling accidents do you think our country should choose?

[Anil Risbud]

Nikhil,

thanks - an excellent insight!

p.s. for india, we may want to add a small variation that also ensures that in addition to the govt., people too, have an incentive to prevent accidents !

Anil

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PTTF" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pttfgen+u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ptt...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pttfgen.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.