Honda recall: Acura TL sedans have potential fluid leak

Honda recall involves nearly 53,000 Acuras from 2007 and 2008. Deteriorating power-steering hoses sparked the Honda recall.

Honda's luxury line, Acura, has issued a voluntarily recall on all 2007 and 2008 TL sedans due to a potential fluid leak caused by worn out power steering hoses.

Acura says there are some 52,615 cars affected by the recall in the U.S. alone.

According to the automaker the power steering hoses on the affected cars may have deteriorated over time, causing a fluid leak to develop.

Leaking power steering fluid could lead to loss of power steering assistance. Furthermore, if the fluid leaks onto a catalytic converter or other parts of the exhaust system it may result in smoke or, in the worst case, fire.

[Call a Texas Product Liability Lawyer to help if you've been involved in an automotive accident]

Acura is making the announcement to encourage owners to take their cars to an authorized dealer as soon as they receive notification of the recall directly from the automaker. Mailed notification to customers will begin in June.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is yet to list the latest Honda recall on its website but concerned TL owners can gather more information by visiting the webpage www.recalls.acura.com or by contacting Acura on (800) 382-2238 and selecting option 4.

So far, no crashes, injuries or fires have been reported related to this issue.

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source: Christian Science Monitor (Vijayenthiran, 5/17)

NHTSA Proposes Electronic Stability Control Systems to Prevent Deadly Rollovers

Manufacturers would have to equip large trucks and buses with safety systems that help prevent rollover accidents through computer-controlled braking, under regulations proposed Wednesday by the government.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s proposal would require electronic stability control in new trucks and buses, including motorcoaches.

The safety system senses when a driver might lose control and automatically applies brakes to individual wheels to keep the vehicle stable and avoid a rollover. It helps prevent skidding across icy or slick roads, and helps motorists keep control when swerving to avoid an unexpected object in the road. The individual wheel braking counters over-steering and under-steering.

Government research shows the technology could prevent up to 56 percent of rollover crashes each year — the deadliest among all crash types — and another 14 percent of loss-of-control crashes.

[Involved in an 18-wheeler or commercial truck accident? Contact us!]

NHTSA estimates that a standard requiring the safety systems on large trucks and large buses would prevent up to 2,329 crashes, eliminate an estimated 649 to 858 injuries, and prevent between 49 and 60 fatalities a year.

The safety systems are already required in passenger cars, sport utility vehicles and light trucks, beginning with the current model year. But the safety systems have been available in all SUVs and many passenger cars for years.

“We’ve already seen how effective stability control can be at reducing rollovers in passenger vehicles,” NHTSA Administrator David Strickland said in a statement. “Now, we’re expanding our efforts to require stability enhancing technology on the many large trucks, motor coaches, and other large buses on our roadways.”

Safety advocates welcomed the proposal.

“Rollover crashes can be costly and catastrophic, especially when involving a large truck weighing 80,000 pounds or a motorcoach carrying as many as 54 passengers,” Jacqueline Gillan, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said.

Preventing a rollover is essential to protecting motorcoach occupants, she said. Motorcoaches have become the over-the-road passenger airlines for millions of families, students, seniors and church groups, with nearly 750 million trips taken each year.

David Champion, senior director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports, has called electronic stability control “the single most important advance in auto safety since the development of the seatbelt.”

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source: Washington Post (Lowy, 5/16)

Paper finds Texas tort reform didn't draw more doctors to state

Black/Hyman/Silver have a new draft paper, "Does Tort Reform Affect Physician Supply? Evidence from Texas," (via Robinette) that substantially undermines the empirical case for the conventional wisdom that Texas's 2003 reforms against medical malpractice lawsuits attracted more doctors to Texas. The result is highly counterintuitive: after all, even the authors acknowledge that the reforms dramatically decreased malpractice expenses for doctors. Are we to conclude that doctors do not respond to economic incentives?
Alas, the authors do not suggest any explanation for the phenomenon they describe. Possibilities:

• The supply of doctors is inelastic relative to after-expense income. This is a testable hypothesis, and would have dramatic implications for "bending the cost curve" of health-care expenditures if true.
• Employers of doctors offset the decrease in medical-malpractice expenditures by decreasing wages paid to doctors. This seems somewhat implausible, as many doctors are independent, and the ones that aren't probably aren't paying for their own malpractice insurance. But it is also a testable hypothesis. Too, if the health-care market in Texas responded to such a wage decrease by reducing costs to patients (or, at least, reducing costs to patients relative to the nationwide trend of rising costs to patients), that is also worth studying, and would be a benefit that may refute the overstated conclusion of the authors that "tort reform is a small idea, when it comes to the larger and linked questions of health care access and affordability."
• The quantity of doctors did not increase, but the doctors responded to the incentives by changing the mix and quality of services provided in any given year: more OB/GYNs willing to deliver babies rather than restricting themselves to less risky work; more doctors willing to work in emergency rooms; doctors spending more time seeing patients and less time in medical-malpractice-related activities like defending themselves in lawsuits, cover-your-ass documentation, and (for better or worse) defensive medicine. If the average practicing doctor is spending more hours with patients post-tort-reform than pre-tort-reform, doctor supply is increasing, even if the raw numbers aren't. I am not aware of any evidence for this, but economic theory would predict this result. It's not clear whether the data exists to test this hypothesis, but as in the parable of the drunk looking for his lost keys under the streetlamp, one should avoid drawing conclusions that contradict economic theory just because it is too difficult to test an alternative hypothesis consistent with economic theory. Too, if defensive medicine practices changed, as one predicts they would, have health outcomes changed for better or worse? (Professor Silver has argued elsewhere his concern that Texas doctors would take less care post-reform.) Again, this is difficult to test, especially since the adverse consequences of many defensive-medicine decisions, such as excessive CAT scans, won't be known until the additional cancers show up decades later. But it is both a potential benefit and a potential cost of tort reform, as we don't know to what extent doctors are properly weighing benefits and costs (including opportunity costs of more intensive treatment of a particular patient) at the margin. Kessler's study, backed to a lesser extent by the CBO, certainly suggests defensive medicine is wasted money at the margin in the state of the world without damages caps, but defensive medicine is surely different today than in the 1980s.
• For many doctors with low-risk practices, malpractice liability is not a large factor in their practice decision. But the malpractice liability crisis most heavily hit high-risk practices, like neurosurgery or OB/GYN or emergency-room care. Did Texas tort reform materially affect the supply of doctors in high-risk specialties, while the effect on low-risk specialties was overwhelmed by noise? This should be a testable hypothesis, but the data is poor because of a change in the way statistics were collected. The authors try to get around this by comparing 1997-2000 growth to 2008-2010 growth, but there's not necessarily a reason that one would predict a post-tort reform world to have a different post-equilibrium effect than a pre-tort reform world. One cannot rule out the hypothesis that doctors overreacted to the new incentive when tort reform was first imposed and that depressed new demand in later years. Of course, one cannot rule out the null hypothesis that a dramatic decrease in malpractice-insurance rates caused by tort reform did not increase the supply of high-risk doctors, though, again, one wishes for an alternative explanation for why doctors are not responding to economic incentives. (Note, too, that the authors' decision of excluding 2001-07 from the data has dramatic effects on the data. It's unclear to me why a reporting change in 2001 that would artificially increase the 2001-02 numbers relative to the 1999-2000 numbers should have an effect on the 2003-07 numbers, especially given the 2000-2003 declines that are being excluded.)

Can anyone think of other alternative hypotheses in the comments?
I remain skeptical that a wealth transfer from lawyers to doctors and patients didn't have positive externalities, but I, for one, am going to stop claiming that Texas tort reform increased doctor supply without better data demonstrating that. More study is needed to explain Black/Hyman/Silver's counterintuitive result, and partisans on both sides need to be more conservative with their policy claims. Earlier.


[source: Point-of-Law, Frank]

City won't pay when poles crash on property

AUSTIN - Joyce Thompson had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and was receiving radiation treatments when her only method of transportation was destroyed.

A city light pole fell on her car while it was parked in her driveway.

"I had to get one of my kids to take me and wait for me, pick me up, take me back home, take me back for radiation," said Thompson, recalling her ordeal that was three years in the making. "And it's just been really hard."

Thompson and her family thought the city would take responsibility for the falling pole, which photographs show was clearly rotted at the core.

"We've been at this address 20-plus years," Thomson said. "And the whole time that we have been there, that pole has never been changed."

Her son Bryan added, "We thought they were going to take a good position and say to themselves, 'OK, let's do something right.' But nothing. Nothing but a 'Go away. Go buy another car. You're a little person,' and 'Get over it.'"

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By the numbers

• 200,000 light poles are in place citywide
• 1,700 complaints about street lights have been logged with the city of Austin since 2009
• 144 of the complaints were for poles that had already fallen
• 2,500 light poles were replaced around the city

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When the city officials made clear they would not take responsibility for the damage to Thompson's Buick Roadmaster, she and her family sought out attorneys Ifeoma Ibekwe and Holly Claghorn.

"This case, it's just a matter of right vs. wrong," said Ibekwe. "It pulls on your heartstrings, and it's just one we couldn't walk away from."

Ibekwe and Claghorn took the case to court, where the justice of the peace ruled that the city was not liable for the damage. The reason is because lawmakers, as part of the Texas Tort Claims Act, have said that cities are not liable for damage caused while performing certain government functions, such as providing lighting for safety.

The pole that fell on the Thompson's car was a light pole and had no utility lines attached to it.

Immune from liability

"They're saying, 'We're not going to touch that. That's not our area. We're immune from liability,'" said Ibekwe. "However, if it was a utility pole and not just a light pole, they would have paid for that.

"And we can't find a way to distinguish why it's OK for a utility poll to fall down and for them to receive compensation," she added. "And yet if it's a light pole -- same type of pole maintained by the city except it just provides lighting -- they call it safety and security."

Meghan Riley, an attorney for the city of Austin, said the city is only following the law and trying to protect taxpayers from frivolous lawsuits.

"Its a sympathetic situation, but it's something the Legislature has made a determination on," Riley said. "And so it's something that the city doesn't have a choice to determine.

"I'm really sorry for her situation," she added. "It's certainly unfortunate that it happened."

But the Thompsons are not the only victims of this kind of situation.

KXAN News uncovered seven cases since January 2009 where light poles have fallen and damaged someone's property. In each case, the city has denied responsibility.

In a case from December 2010, a couple was driving near the Arboreteum in North Austin when a metal light pole fell on their car. Photos of that pole show rust at the base.

The couple was told the city was not responsible.

What about inspections?

"The city has an inspection program for the light poles that run electric wires but not for the ones that have lighting on them. But if you're a citizen walking around the street and you see a light pole, that's a distinction that doesn't matter to you and if it falls on your car it doesn't matter what kind of wires were connected to it," said Claghorn.

The Thompson family and their attorneys want the city to do a better job of inspecting the poles, but that presents a challenge for the city.

"It's similar to the city sidewalk.  We have, however, many miles of sidewalks, and we can't possibly inspect them in an organized way to take care of all that, so we rely on the public to let us know when they see something," said Riley.

That's small comfort to Joyce Thompson and others who found themselves having to pay for damage that was caused by city equipment. Thompson was finally able to replace her car about a month ago, nearly three years after the city's pole fell on it.

"I just really want them to do their job," she said, "not, not just -- you know --  not do anything about it."

What can you do?

If you see a dangerous light poll, call 311, and advise the call-taker of the pole's location and condition

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source:  KXAN (Wolfson, 5/1)