Alex still has some headaches and body aches and it is hard for him to concentrate, but he seems to be doing okay. I will drive up to Harrisonburg to see him later today and bring him home if he is still feeling bad. This will create some troubles for his classes, since papers are due and exam time is here, but I think he has a valid excuse. His attack made the Harrisonburg papers, although they didn’t mention him by name, so he has some credibility
There is an interest health care debate permutation, however. Alex has only a few days left on our insurance, since he turned 22 last month and he gets a month of grace time. We have signed him up for insurance, which will take effect on May 1. So he will go into eight days of non-insurance. Even when he gets the insurance, it has a high deductible, so we may end up paying a lot anyway.
The irony here is that if he had been in an accident, if someone had hit him with a car, he would probably had everything paid for by the insurance of the driver. He would probably get an extra pay out for pain and suffering. Or if the authorities had acted inappropriately he would have been in line for a huge compensation. But since he was the victim of random but deliberate violence, he is just on his own. Well, not on his own since we will take care of him, but you get the irony.
If I accidentally hit a pedestrian while riding my bike, and he sustained injuries similar to Alex’s, I would probably have to pay damages to include the actual medical costs, plus pain and suffering and probably punitive damages. But if I successfully avoided the crash and the guy fell into the hands of a thug who beat him, he would get nothing.
We have created a system where an honest citizen must fear lawsuits even for things he doesn’t directly control and a legitimate victim of deliberate violence can expect nothing. Violent perpetrators w/o significant assets can pretty much get away with anything from the civil point of view and even from the criminal one. We are also more likely to take seriously a bent bumper on a car than a bump on somebody’s head.