Quick Read
According to a comprehensive national survey by Genworth Financial, long-term care costs were up in most out-of-the-home settings and are uniformly well above national levels: Keep in mind that these were the increases and costs before the state began enforcing legislation making Rhode Island’s minimum staffing mandates for nursing homes perhaps the most extreme on…
The following sentence, concerning the attorney general’s scuttling of a hospital merger deal, from Ted Nesi’s weekend roundup column brought to mind a different industry: Yet in the end, their plans were derailed by a concern raised on day one: how could a hospital group with roughly 80% market share be stopped from abusing its…
The Valley Breeze is a notable standout in local journalism, with observable quality and dedication. Indeed, the fact that its chief editor, Ethan Shorey, spends hours each week actually delivering the paper has a back-to-our-roots feel that one can’t help but admire and encourage for the paper’s peers. But zooming out to the whole industry, rather than…
If you’re only a casual observer of legislation and/or labor law, you might find news coverage of Rhode Island labor unions’ study on “wage theft” confusing. The study is about misclassification of workers as independent contractors, yet the rhetoric is about “wage theft.” Are those the same thing? It’s an important question, because the push…
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha isn’t wrong to be concerned about a lack of competition in healthcare in our state, but our selective acceptance of market forces is going to start killing Rhode Islanders: Attorney General Peter Neronha on Thursday rejected the proposed merger of Rhode Island’s two largest hospital groups and joined a…
Perhaps the key detail to be found in the report and interactive tools that the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) just released is to be found at the top of its associated infographic. As shown in the featured image of this post, although Rhode Island is the 18th state in the country for per…
Policy decisions can obviously increase or decrease the amount of poverty in a society. Socialism, for example, is absolutely devastating and has repeatedly proven to result in misery and starvation. That said, the following pair of tweets from Atlantic writer Clint Smith gets reality precisely backwards, and in a way that is important for everybody…
You know you’re dealing with greedy special interests most concerned with maintaining their own position when you read something like this, emphasis added: The plan has the support of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, the Rhode Island School Superintendents’ Association, the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Hassenfeld Institute for…
As in a horror story in which some trusted institution becomes possessed by an evil force, something has changed in youth culture and our schools. Youth media has long (always?) fostered doubt about whether parents could really understand what their children were going through (as opposed to glossy magazines, Hollywood, and pop stars). As the evil…
General Assembly politics are a mystery to most Rhode Islanders. They don’t really understand why anybody wants the job, figuring that some people are just into that sort of thing. Yes, some people are really, really into it. John G. Edwards, the Fourth, has been the Democrat representative from district 70 since 2008, having previously…