Debunking the Social Burden Theory

Injured motorcyclists. They’re nothing but a burden on American taxpayers.

You’ve heard it repeated a thousand times, so it must be true, right?

Well, no. But try telling that to the people who make government policies in this country—or to those in the news media who cover safety issues.

The so-called social burden theory goes like this: Motorcyclists get injured in accidents. Then they go to hospitals where they rack up enormous medical expenses. And when it comes time to pay those bills, it turns out they have no insurance, so American taxpayers get stuck with the tab.

We’ve been hearing it for nearly 20 years, most recently in an ABC “World News Tonight” report last winter on how irresponsible riders were using up inordinate amounts of taxpayer dollars. But that doesn’t make it any closer to the truth.

Amazingly, this whole issue can be traced back to a single study in the 1980s—a study in which researchers specifically avoided giving people the whole picture. And although the AMA was able to point out the obvious errors in their research at that time, the myth of irresponsible motorcyclists has taken on a life of its own.

That study looked at patients brought to Harborview Medical Center, a major trauma center in the Seattle area. It reported that 63.4 percent of the injured motorcyclists taken to Harborview relied on public funds to pay their hospital bills.

If you heard that number, you might think there must be something to this whole social-burden argument. But what the researchers didn’t say is that 67 percent of all patients taken to Harborview were unable to pay their medical bills.

Why are the numbers so high? The main reason is that Harborview, as a regional trauma center, gets the worst injuries in the entire Seattle area. In other words, it gets the patients who are most likely to require more care than their insurance will cover.

But regardless of the reasons, the point is that motorcyclists taken to Harborview were actually less likely to rely on public funding than the general public. So if there was a group of irresponsible patients at Harborview, it wasn’t the motorcyclists.

All of those were facts that the researchers chose not to report, perhaps because they didn’t fit a preconceived notion of what the study ought to say.

Over the years, other studies have shown the same thing. A report by the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center, for instance, found that 49.5 percent of injured motorcyclists had their medical costs covered by insurance, which is almost identical to the 50.4 percent for other road trauma victims. And the North Carolina study found that the average costs for treating a motorcyclist’s injuries were actually slightly lower than the costs for other accident victims.

Despite all that, the issue continues to come up in reports from various safety organizations and in news accounts of them. As Ed Moreland, the AMA’s vice president for government relations, notes, it’s enough to make you wonder if we’re all reading the same studies.

“Some researchers, members of the news media and others still subscribe to the social burden fallacy that motorcyclists use more taxpayer dollars than other members of society to pay their medical bills,” says Moreland. “That wasn’t true in the past, and there’s no evidence it’s true now. Yet we keep having to make that case in legislative committee meetings and regulatory hearings.”

So if somebody tries to tell you that motorcyclists are nothing but a burden on society, what can you do? Go tell them to check their facts.