Accident & Injury Law in Texas

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Austin police are investigating the death of a man who was hit by a vehicle after he got out of his car to inspect damage from a wreck Friday night.

Just after 10 p.m., Jose Angel Fuentes-Reyes, 28, was stopped at a traffic light at Manor Road and Airport Boulevard when his pickup was rear-ended by a Chevrolet Tahoe, police said.  When Fuentes-Reyes got out of his truck, the Tahoe driver backed up and drove forward to leave the scene, police said.

The Tahoe hit Fuentes-Reyes as he tried to stop it, police said.  He was taken to University Medical Center at Brackenridge where he died Saturday, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call police at (512) 974-8212.

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Yikes!  I’m not the only one.  Texas families saw their health insurance premiums soar 40 percent in five years - 10 times faster then their incomes increased, according to a report released today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., a national foundation that promotes health care improvement.

The foundations report, “Squeezed: How Costs for Insuring Families are Outpacing Income” was prepared by University of Minnesota researchers, did not study why premiums increase almost 30 percent nationally to an average of $10,728 in 2005.  In Texas, premiums jumped to an average $11,533.

Nationally, Texas ranked third behind Oklahoma and Idaho in premium increases from 2001 to 2005.  At the same time, Texas ranked No. 1 in the percentage of residents without insurance.  In 2005-2006 that figure was 27 percent and the state had 5.5 million of the nation’s 47 million uninsured people.

People without coverage often get expensive emergency room care, and those costs get passed on as higher premiums to people with insurance, says Regina Rogoff, the executive director of People’s Community Clinic which treats uninsured people in the Austin area.

Taxpayers also share the tab when hospitals and governments do more to help the uninsured according to Clarke Heidrick, a member of the Travis County Healthcare District Board.

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New research by Harvard-affiliated researches which appears in the Archive of Internal Medicine challenges the notion that you can be fat and fit which found that being active can lower but not eliminate heart risks faced by heavy women.

Previous research has gone back and forth on whether exercise or weight has a greater influence on heart disease risks.

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Children should be screened for heart problems with an electrocardiogram before taking drugs such as Ritalin to treat hyperactivity and attention-defecit disorder according to the American Heart Association.  Children already on the drugs should also be tested.

Stimulants can increase blood pressure and heart rate which for most children isn’t a problem.  But for those with heart conditions, it could make them more vulnerable to sudden cardiac arrest - an erratic heartbeat that causes the organ to stop pumping blood through the body - and other heart problems.

About 2.5 million children and 1.5 million adults in America take some form of medication for attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder, or ADHD, according to government estimates.

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