I was sitting in Barnes & Noble as I’m known to do occasionally, reading some of those zany British motorcycle magazines that make our American mags look like vegan cookbooks by comparison. I was reading an issue of Visor Down and noticed an interesting tidbit in the “confessionals” section. I snapped a quick photo (above) of the reader’s submitted letter. The part that jumped out at me was:
After a trip in the big NHS taxi, I found myself in casualty, on a Friday night and it was packed. I was walking wounded so I was left in the corridor on a luxury PVC NHS wheelchair. After about 2 hours, and feeling a bit stiff, I decided to hop across the packed waiting room to the drinks machine.
This story takes a more interesting turn, but the fact that this guy took for granted that he could be stuffed into a plastic wheelchair and left in a hallway after crashing his motorycle is absolutely ridiculous. Motorcyclists are known to be a little more freedom-loving (and -exercising) than most…yet this guy, a product of European socialism, has been conditioned to think that his situation was acceptable.
Depending on your monitor size, the text of the article may or may not be legible in the photo above. Let me clarify: he didn’t write to complain about his experience at a government (NHS) hospital. He wrote in to say how embarassed he was that, during the “hop to the drinks machine” he mentioned above, he realized that the crash had ripped the butt out of his jeans and boxer shorts, exposing him to the people in the waiting room. As an freedom-loving American, I would like to point out that his REAL source of embarassment should be his nation’s government healthcare system!
North Dakota has a lot of motorcyclists, especially considering our weather. If you’re one of them, and think that the government won’t find a way to penalize you for riding a motorcycle under its “fair” new health care system, you’re deluding yourself. Call Dorgan, Pomeroy, and Conrad and tell them to vote NO on government health care!
I was discussing this with a nice gentleman from the Cato institute last fall, and he pointed out that motorcyclists should probably pay more for insurance because they present a greater risk. He didn’t state that as his opinion, just as a matter of the business of insuring against such risk. I agree from a business standpoint, because the free market will sort this out just like anything else.
Case in point:, in the 80s it was very difficult to insure a motorcycle like mine. Yet, the sportbike riders were out there, and enterprising insurance companies bucked the trend to shy away from them and be the only ones to offer reasonably priced coverage. Now it’s easy and cheap to insure a sportbike capable of 300kph like mine, even with a $100 deductible! The free market sorts things out and lowers prices like government never could. See what happens when motorcyclists band together?
Once again, I implore you to call Conrad, Dorgan, and Pomeroy to urge them to vote against government run health care. Your fellow bikers will thank you…we’re all in this together.
In case you don’t know the story: I’ve been trying to get to the 3,000 mile mark on my mountain bike for the longest time. Technically speaking, I’m several hundred miles past it…but due to various speedometer failures over the years I’ve never seen it indicated, and therefore I’ve never considered it “official”. That is, until today.
I managed to get out on two of my motorcycles tonight, too, and while giving my youngest little boy a ride I noticed that I was about to reach the same milestone on that particular machine. A few blocks from home the odometer ticked over to 3000.0, and we pulled over for a quick snapshot of photographic proof. Awesome.
