Originally Posted by
Nightstop
I hope the climber gets sent the bill. It’s similar to a sail boat Skipper requesting a tow into a Marina because his engine has failed. You partake in these amateur hobbies, you accept the consequences imho.
This thought is as old as the profession of SAR itself. And it has been tried, to charge the subjects that is. The problem is that it ends up costing society far more, than to bear the cost of the occasional rescue. If a person (climber, hiker, lost Mountainbiker etc) knows that it'll cost them half their salary to dial 911, they won't dial until the last second or at all. At which point the rescue will usually have become far more complicated and costly, or turn into a body recovery, which is often many times more expensive than a simple helo pickup, all things considered. This isn't something I dreamed up, this was the response i received from a senior team leader of a local SAR organisation, after i asked the same question (we had just spent a day in an AS350, looking for some geniuses that were lost in a river canyon without even a pair of shoes).
Point is, yes it costs money to pick up some.. less smart, or plain unfortunate people, but it's still the best option there is. No, being charged for rescues has been shown to NOT be an effective deterrence for dangerous behavior, as nobody thinks it will happen to them anyway. Nobody goes out thinking they may come back on a winch, especially not those daredevils, like the base jumpers that are usually mentioned here.
Lastly, if we want to reduce the burden on society creates by unnecessary health care cost, we would have to first charge anyone who participates in team sports like football, or the other football (which are incredibly injury prone in general), and of course anyone who consumes chips and beer, because those associated costs are many, many orders of magnitude higher than those of an occasional hiker extraction. The rescue in that video may have cost some five figure sum, and will still be "cheaper" than what someone's self inflicted Diabetes costs "us" every month. We can then also point out that someone who climbs mountains for entertainment is far less likely to suffer these other conditions... At the latest at this point, the proposal usually loses public support.