• 23
  • May
    2011

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, motor-vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death for children, teens and young adults from ages 5 to 34 years old. Each year, more than 30,000 people are killed in car accidents nationwide, resulting in $41 billion in medical and work-loss costs as well as the immeasurable losses suffered by victims' families and friends.

In Florida, the total fatal car accident costs were $3.16 billion in one year, according to the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Contributing to these costs are $40 million in medical costs and $3.2 billion in work-loss costs.

Work-loss costs are the monetary losses that result from car-crash fatalities in regard to the absence of victims' future work earnings and household contributions. As defined by the CDC, work-loss costs are a sum of the "estimated salary, fringe benefits and value of household work that an average person - of the same age and sex as the person who died - would be expected to earn over the remainder of his or her lifetime."

Because young people killed in car accidents are assumed to have otherwise worked for a long period of time, the resulting work-loss cost is higher than for an older person who would have had fewer years of future work. For example, in Florida, young adults age 20 to 34 years old had $1.32 billion in total crash-related death costs, whereas adults age 35 to 64 years old had total crash-related death costs that were $23 billion less.

Many of Florida's motor-vehicle accidents are preventable, but when an unavoidable accident occurs, vehicle safety equipment must be relied upon to prevent serious injury. By implementing the CDC's recommended strategies to improve motor-vehicle safety, such as enacting a primary enforcement seat-belt law, millions of dollars and, most important, thousands of lives could be saved.

Source: CDC.gov, "Florida: Cost of Deaths From Motor Vehicle Crashes," 5/10/2011