Either way, that set amount of money that you can afford to invest in healthcare will go further if you buckle up. In a ‘normal’ insurance contract, those that did not wear seatbelts when the accident occurs don’t have their healthcare claims reimbursed by the insurer. By comparison, those that are willing to pay a bit more money to get a more comprehensive insurance policy that, in this case, covers healthcare even if one doesn’t wear one’s seatbelt, can do so.

It’s a matter of your own personal choice: and monetised such that everyone can understand the decision that he or she makes. The government, by comparison, doesn’t really understand it. Back in the early 1980s, UCL’s own John Adams published findings that showed that, around the world, seatbelts (on average) killed more people than they saved. This was borne out in the evidence in the first years of introduction in the UK.

Why? Because people that are told to wear their seatbelts feel as though they are safe, when they most certainly are not. People that wear seatbelts drive faster than people that don’t, have more car-on-car accidents, and kill and injure more pedestrians. These are things that a binary ‘make seatbelts compulsory’ or ‘don’t make seatbelts compulsory’ setting do not consider. It is a clear case of government failure.

These things can, again, all be monetised in the form of expenses on healthcare, life insurance, legal liabilities, etc. In the terminology of the economics of law, by passing those costs onto someone else, we create a moral hazard that leads to under-cautious behaviour. That greatly harms our national health.