I live in Australia where you can roll into a hospital, limbless after a Great White attack, and walk out with sparkling new prosthetics, all for free. Rehab and boiled chicken dinners included. Ain’t quite the same in the US.

There’s very little to be gained by diving into the political quagmire that is the American healthcare system.

Where Australia, Canada, the UK, Scandinavia and various European countries exist, reasonably happily, with a quasi-socialised system, the United States splits, electorally, on the concept that good healthcare should be available whatever your means.

Whichever way you swing, the bottom line is this:

Don’t get a board in the head in the US.

Because you gonna be slugged thousands before your health insurance, if you’ve got it, kicks in.

I live in Australia where you can roll into a hospital, limbless after a Great White attack, and walk out with sparkling new prosthetics, all for free.

Rehab and boiled chicken dinners included.

Ain’t quite the same in the US.

But, a start-up called Spot, which sponsors surfer Anthony Walsh and snowboarder Travis Rice, has exposed a loophole in the system and cut a deal with the world’s largest insurance companies to back a twenty-five-dollars-a-month, accident-only insurance policy that will cover the first twenty gees of your visit to a doc.

Each time you get injured. No limits.

Bust a leg. Twenty. Break a nose. Twenty. Guts ripped out by VAL. Twenty.

Y’see, if you strip cancer treatment and other catastrophic long-term illness out of the health insurance policy costs drop dramatically.

Matt Randall, a thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur, was turned onto the idea of by his wife’s pal Maria Miller who worked in the insurance biz.

Randall’s wife said he might wanna jump on Maria’s idea of an affordable injury-only insurance.

“It was massive. I said, ‘Why hasn’t this been done?’” he says.

It’s a no-brainer for Americans, I suggest to Randall. Three hundred bucks a year or thereabouts and you’ll never have to cop for the first twenty gees for injury-related surgery.

“Well, it’s an amazing concept if you live in America; if you live in a place where there’s universal healthcare it’s a terrible concept,” he says.

So far, forty-three of the fifty American states allow Spot to offer coverage, although you’ll be covered 24/7 whatever state, or country, you get busted in.

Randall says the Texas-based company’s biggest challenge is proving to people they’re legit.

“We could’ve charged more but we’re going for the volume play,” he says.

Gotta be a catch, no?

Exclusions?

“If immediate failure is death, we don’t cover it,” says Matt. “If you fail at base jumping there’s no option but death. On Everest, if you fail, you can survive. We cover that. Skydiving, you fall, you die. Most people aren’t getting injured skydiving.”

The company doesn’t just cover boards in the head or fins in the guts, either.

“One of our ambassadors, a top skier in the world, a guy called Julian Carr who does two-hundred foot jumps off clips, had never filed a claim. Two weeks ago, he was walking his dog, the leash wrapped around his little finger and broke it. Two thousand bucks. We cover that.”

Travel overseas and you’re covered.

Roll your car off a cliff, come out alive but torn to shreds.

Covered.

I can’t find holes in this thing, hence the ringing endorsement.

Am I wrong?

(Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post although some readers may find it useful.)

"I thought, whale or shark…"

A woman who was hit by a Great White twelve days ago, the third attack on a surfer by a White on roughly the same stretch of coast in two months, has recalled the event in an interview with The Guardian.

Environmental scientist Chantelle Doyle, who is thirty-five, was surfing a weak two-foot swell at Shelley Beach in Port Macquarie with her boyfriend Mark Rapley when the White hit.

“As I was paddling, something hit me underneath the board with enough thrust to throw me up and off the board,” Doyle told The Guardian. “I just thought – ‘whale or shark’ – and I looked down and there was nothing grey. I felt something grab my leg – I think I yelled ‘Shark, shark, shark’. It grabbed me and I grabbed the board and it readjusted … There were three distinct readjustments of the jaws. I was holding on to the nose of my board. It was like being bitten by a dog – it’s painful but it’s more this intense pressure and squeezing and crushing.”

Rapley climbed onto the animal and started belting what he describes as feeling like “a professional boxing bag.”

“I was just flailing – Hail Mary punches – and I’m thinking ‘Just get the bloody hell off’. I was connecting, but after the first two it felt ineffectual… Chon’s leg was completely in its mouth,” said Rapley, who is haunted by the vision of the shark’s head and eyes.

The hit severed a nerve in Doyle’s leg. No moment and only limited feeling despite two major operations, the first a seven-hour marathon to repair damage to muscle, tendons, bone and nerves.

The second operation was a skin graft to cover a hole the size of an orange in Doyle’s calf.

It ain’t clear what’s going to happen to the stilt, but a prosthetic limb isn’t out of the picture.

Despite the injury, Doyle is using her new-found profile to raise money for a marine charity via crowdfunding.

The hashtag?

#punchingforhealthyoceans.

“We’re not suddenly shark evangelists,” says Doyle. “But they are a keystone species and we want our kids to have a nicer environment. I’m actually proud that Australia has marine systems that are healthy and sharks are an integral part of that. Having sharks means you have higher densities of fish, and so we should be proud of that.”

Read full story here.