Costs of crashes to government, United States, 2008.

Costs of crashes to government, United States, 2008. Ann Adv Automot Med. 2011;55:347-55 Authors: Miller TR, Bhattacharya S, Zaloshnja E, Taylor D, Bahar G, David I Abstract We estimated how much the Federal government and state/local government pay for different kinds of crashes in the United States. Government costs include reductions in an array of public services (emergency, incident management, vocational rehabilitation, coroner court processing of liability litigation), medical payments, social safety net assistance to the injured and their families, and taxes foregone because victims miss work. Government also pays when its employees crash while working and covers fringe benefits for crash-involved employees and their benefit-eligible dependents in non-work hours. We estimated government shares of crash costs by component. We applied those estimates to existing US Department of Transportation estimates of crash costs to society and employers. Government pays an estimated $35 billion annually because of crashes, an estimated 12.6% of the economic cost of crashes (Federal 7.1%, State/local 5.5%). Government bears a higher percentage of the monetary costs of injury crashes than fatal crashes or crashes involving property damage only. Government is increasingly recovering the medical cost of crashes from auto insurers. Nevertheless, medical costs and income and sales tax losses account for 75% of government's crash costs. For Stat...
Source: Annals of Advances in Automotive Medicine - Category: Global & Universal Tags: Ann Adv Automot Med Source Type: research