PANAMA CITY BEACH — It had been five years since Panama City Beach made it to July without a reported saltwater drowning, but it happened this year.
In 2009, at least four people drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, but nobody drowned until August. Yet at least three more people had drowned by the end of October.
About 50 people have drowned in the Gulf along Panama City Beach since 2008. Most of the deaths were caused by rip currents, but a few were likely because of underlying health conditions that struck while the victims were in the water. The vast majority of those who drowned were visitors.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the Panhandle and Panama City Beach specifically is a “serious trouble-spot over the past 10 years or so as tourism has increased, but provision of lifeguard services has not increased in parallel.”
A split Bay County Commission rejected a proposal in March to station two lifeguards during peak season at the M.B. Miller County Pier, the county’s busiest public beach access and the most common site of drowning deaths since 2008.
Since then, there have been four drowning deaths at the pier, and 10 people have drowned in the area of the 12000 block of Front Beach Road, which includes the pier. All 10 were from other states, and nine of the 10 died in June, July or August.
The debate about whether to provide lifeguards at public beaches in Bay County is rekindled every few years. The county has saved hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over the years by declining to provide them.
But water emergencies are not without cost, either, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest lifeguards actually might make good fiscal sense, at least from a broad perspective.
County Commission Chairman Guy Tunnell, who supported hiring lifeguards, believes they are a moral responsibility; if Bay County opens its beaches to visitors, it should try to keep them safe.
But Tunnell wondered whether lifeguards might make economic sense, too. He pointed to all the costs associated with search-and-rescue efforts.
The costs of Panama City Beach’s Beach and Surf Patrol — three people working full-time who each conduct dozens of rescues each year — and the costs of putting the Bay County Sheriff’s Office helicopter in the air and Coast Guard ships in the water to search for missing swimmers would be difficult to calculate, but they would seem to be significant, he said.
Some organizations have tried to estimate the cost of drownings and near-drownings in terms of medical costs and loss of productivity. The costs are “staggering,” said Joe McManus, adviser and former president for the Southeast region of the United States Lifesaving Association.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the average cost of drowning to be about $4,400 when adjusted for inflation. But that’s just the medical cost. It doesn’t account for the average cost of the loss of that person’s work, which adds more than $1 million and brings the combined average cost of a single drowning to $1,146,880.
Someone who survives being submerged for an extended length of time paid an average of $35,106 in medical costs in 2005 prices. When the cost of the loss of that person’s work is included, the average drowning survivor cost $318,116 in 2005 prices.
Even people who are treated and released at the emergency room paid an average combined cost of $1,410 in 2005 prices.
“It is clear that providing a safe aquatic environment and instituting programs to prevent aquatic injury or death offer significant economic and social savings to society as a whole,” a 2001 CDC report on lifeguard effectiveness says.
The economic cost of one drowning was $790,000 in 1997, the National Safety Council estimated. That figure represents expenses from the victim’s death and the loss of the victim’s productivity.
The Florida Department of Health (DOH) estimates nonfatal submersion-related injuries among Florida residents alone cost more than $15 million in 2011 in medical care expenses. That figure doesn’t include tourists, the group that accounts for the vast majority of saltwater drowning deaths in Bay County, DOH officials said.
Bay Medical Center in 2011 admitted 19 patients in fatal and nonfatal submersions, spokeswoman Christa Davis said. In 2012, there were 27, and last year there were 15. Already this year, 12 people have been admitted to Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center for nonfatal submersions. There were 15 in 2013.
Cost to taxpayers
Medicaid is increasingly footing the bill for the medical costs of those who get in trouble in the water in Florida. The taxpayer-funded insurance program was the payer for 47 percent of the 320 hospitalizations in 2011, the most recent year data is available, when the median admission charge was $16,338.
In 2009, the median admission charge was $11,747, and Medicaid covered 39 percent of those patients, which was up from the year before when the median admission charge was $10,713 and Medicaid covered 33 percent of those patients.
Part of the reason for the rise in Medicaid coverage for drowning and near-drowning medical costs is probably randomness, said Amy Baker, chief economist for the Legislative Office of Economic and Demographic Research. It’s just the luck of the draw when a rip current takes a Medicaid recipient.
But the number of Floridians on Medicaid has risen dramatically in recent years. In the 2007-08 fiscal year, just over 2.1 million Floridians were on Medicaid, Baker said. This year more than 3.7 million Floridians will rely on Medicaid, Baker said.
“Every time someone uses Medicaid services, Floridians are going to pay approximately 40 cents of every dollar,” she said.
Florida pays its share of Medicaid expenses from the general fund, which is primarily sales tax revenue, Baker added.
To Tunnell, spending money on lifeguards probably isn’t as expensive as the alternative.
“I guess I’m old school,” Tunnell said. “I think the cost of not doing something is greater than the cost of doing it.”