[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

... We have to accept that emergency rooms will not be put out of business anytime in our foreseeable future. We should do everything reasonable to keep people safe from harm

but everything about this system looks wrong to me. Esp the fact that it is being mandated by lawyers and elected officials, not by people who work in the industry to ensure worker safety.

Hard to argue with this. The inventor/petitioner is a lawyer, albeit one with a Ph.D. in Physics. I don't know if the CPSC people are elected, but they're certainly public servants -- and some of them are engineers, as Alan pointed out above..

My reservation about those opposing the petition is that parts of their argument, that safety features are expensive, inconvenient and imperfect, can be used generically against almost any safety feature.

Market forces might eventually impel adoption of safety features. Is that our standard for doing "everything reasonable to keep people safe from harm"? If so then our public servants should simply make rules requiring 'economic' safety; i.e., make us safe enough to avoid spending more on post-accident treatment than we would on pre-accident prevention. By this standard, the issue raised by the petitioners amounts to asking who should pay. Clearly the cost of treatment is paid by those who are injured or by all of us in the form of taxes, insurance premiums, etc. And if the regulations don't change, the cost of prevention will remain optional.