I am (relatively) young, fit, active and, by upbringing, reticent about troubling the state for any kind of boon. I don't smoke, don't drink to excess and hoover up my greens with lip-smacking righteousness. I keep trim and look after my ticker. If I owned a golden retriever and a herring-bone sweater, I could feature on the cover of a knitting pattern. Yet in the last eighteen months, I've cost the taxpayer something like £25,000 in healthcare costs and sick pay. I'm also likely to cost the insurance industry at least this amount. I wouldn't, however, fall foul of Mr Brown's new proposals on NHS reform.

I was a keen cyclist and would often crank out a couple of dozen miles on wind-swept Lincolnshire roads. Then some barely competent and therefore typical motorist, acting as an agent of statistical inevitability, fluffed an overtake and her car tried to eat my back wheel. I was flicked onto her windscreen and bowled spinning into the weeds. The bike's back was broken and so was mine. Once I found that I could move my toes, I was far more upset about the bike.

To cut a long, sore and tedious story short, my spine was repaired with two operations and a quantity of titanium. The bike, I'm sorry to say, didn't make it and was melted into alloy slag after a brief gadget-stripping ceremony. Had I really cared about the environment and the taxpayer, I could have offered the bike to the surgeon as an alloy-donor. So it goes.

I've had a substantial amount of paid time off from my public sector job. The third party insurer has admitted liability and will at some stage be paying me at least £25,000 in compensation. If my injuries affect my long-term employability in my chosen career, this figure could increase exponentially.

If I recover as well as I’d like (I’m bloody-minded enough to do it), I intend to resume cycling. If I cycle for another two or three decades, I’d have to dodge the statistical raindrops not to pick up another high-calibre injury. Even if I forsook cycling and found an outdoor activity with the same aerobic benefits, I’d be injured sooner or later. I don’t want to complicate the debate by mentioning my intrepid forays into skiing, where my inertia substantially exceeded my skill.

So, wouldn’t I have caused everyone much less fuss and expense if I’d devoted myself to a sofa-bound lifetime of vicarious thrills and angina pills? By spending my pennies on cigarettes and alcohol, wouldn’t that have made me more of a giver than a taker in the chancellor’s eyes? If medical practitioners are to risk-assess their patients, should they tut and make warding gestures at rock climbers, rugby players and car-less road users, as well as doughnut-crammers and chain-smokers?

Not that I’m complaining. I’ve done very well out of the NHS and the insurance industry. And because I’ve worked at my fitness where others haven’t, the possibility of cultural triage in healthcare certainly panders to my prejudices. Yet what if one day it is deemed that cost is king? What if using an exercise bike in the living room while wearing a cotton-wool helmet became the only form of recreation not to attract a premium?

A US firm with premises in London recently tried to bar its workers from cycling to work. Regardless of the implications for the employees’ fitness and finances, having them at large on city streets presented too great a risk to the company’s finances to be tolerated. This proves one thing: a logical and statistically sound edict can still be wholly wrong.