Should Accident Victims Pay for Their Rescues?
ABOUT a year ago Cary Feldman was surprised to find himself sprawled on the pavement in an intersection in Chicago Heights, Ill., having been knocked off his motor scooter by the car behind him. Five months later he got another surprise: a bill from the fire department for responding to the scene of the accident.
“I had no idea what the fire truck was there for,” said Mr. Feldman, of nearby Matteson. “It came, it looked and it left. I was not hurt badly. I had scratches and bruises. I did not go to the hospital.”
Mr. Feldman had become enmeshed in what appears to be a nascent budget-balancing trend in municipal government: police and fire departments have begun to charge accident victims as a way to offset budget cuts.
Far be it from me to oppose a budget-cutting measure, but this approach seems mistargeted. Accident victims who take significant, unnecessary risks should certainly pay for their own rescues. An example would be a mountain climber who ignored warnings of bad weather and then got trapped by an avalanche.
But an unsupsecting motorcylcist hit by a car? Why not make the driver of the car pay?
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Livin' on the Edge
I usually agree with you Professor, but in this case I don’t understand why “rescue” charges should be any different from any other type of contractual agreement? For instance, any damage the car caused the scooter would have to be paid for by the scooter driver and then the scooter driver could sue the car driver and a judge would determine levels of liability. Why can’t the scooter driver just sue the car driver for the rescue charges and allow a judge to determine levels of liability? It doesn’t seem to me to be the role of the fire department to decide whose fault the accident was and who should foot the bill on a per accident basis. That seems to be the role of a judge.
ElGreco
Scooter driver, car driver, and everyone else has been obligated to buy the mandatory once zero deductible rescue and emergency insurance. Not surprisingly, we now all bicker what this insurance monopoly should and should not cover, what is and what is not deductible and by how much, how much is the copay and what behaviors are ultimately “acceptable” in terms of the risks they carry…
Jess
The main problem I see with fire departments levying “rescue” fees of this sort is that it gives them an unhealthy interest in vigilantly attending the scene of every fender bender. Much like the police department and prosecutor “entrepreneurialism” documented by Radley Balko, the “customer” in this case had no option to decline service, so we can be sure that we’ll see more of this abusive behavior. Somehow I suspect that there would be closer scrutiny of this practice if the fire departments implementing it were private rather than state-owned. If we are to believe that there are benefits to living under the thumb of a state, surely one of those benefits can be fire and police departments that can do their own budgeting for legitimate operating expenses?