As much of the local, state, and national media goes woke, established publications like the Providence Journal have seemed more even-handed in contrast. An article by Katherine Gregg about a Rhode Island psychiatrist who dissents from the demanded view on COVID blows that impression up. Some of the paragraphs that make me wonder whether the Projo has laid off all its editors.
For instance, what is the relevance of the date to this particular story?
On a broadcast, aired on the anniversary of the January 6 siege of the nation’s Capitol, she lamented the COVID “hysteria” being perpetrated by “many different media outlets about the virus.”
What evidence does Gregg have that the doctor was speaking based on “talking points” rather than her informed opinion?
Asked if McCance-Katz had been given the go-ahead to argue GOP talking points in venues outside Rhode Island, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals said…
Gregg throws a bunch of stuff in the pot to make Dr. McCance-Katz (no relation) seem like a partisan Republican and then blame her for long-running troubles at the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital, but it’s a farce to enforce an partisan, ideological line and distract from true responsibility.
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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:
| RI Cost | U.S. Cost | RI Premium | RI Rank | RI 2020-2021 Increase | U.S. 2020-2021 Increase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homemaker Services | $68,640 | $59,488 | 15% | 12th | 3% | 11% |
| Home Health Aide | $71,500 | $61,776 | 16% | 7th | 1% | 13% |
| Adult Day Health Care | $21,580 | $20,280 | 6% | 23rd | 11% | 5% |
| Assisted Living Facilities | $81,915 | $54,000 | 52% | 3rd | 38% | 5% |
| Nursing Home: Semi-Private Room | $113,150 | $94,900 | 19% | 19th | 9% | 2% |
| Nursing Home: Private Room | $120,450 | $108,405 | 11% | 20th | -2% | 2% |
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 planet. Those six-figure costs in Rhode Island at the bottom of the table are sure to explode in this year’s version of the survey.
Featured image by Matthew Bennett on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Attorney General Peter Neronha stands out (against RI’s low threshold for leadership).
- Governor Dan McKee inspires no confidence appointing advisors and leading into his big announcement.
- Voting laws offer hints about intra-Democrat differences in corruption.
- COVID is going away, but some won’t admit it.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Whether or not one agrees with Attorney General Peter Neronha’s decision to block a major merger of Rhode Island hospital companies, the fact that it wasn’t really a typical Rhode Island decision-making process cannot be denied. From that fact we can learn an important lesson.
Personal integrity probably played a role, of course, but one reason he was able to buck expectations was that Neronha was tasked with answering a specific question based on a clear set of standards (i.e., the law). That is how we should strive to structure all administrative and judicial (as opposed to legislative) decisions in government. Unfortunately, we’ve become too accustomed to elected officials and judges simply imposing their best judgment (I’m being charitable) regardless of what law or regulation might say.
People who do that have to be removed from office. Of course, political insiders will always prefer that decisions be made behind closed doors for political reasons, with justification pieced together after the fact as a disguise for the corruption.
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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 dominant position?
Why is abuse of a dominant position a matter of concern in healthcare but not in education? Not surprisingly, Erika Sanzi had the same thought:
Listening to @AGNeronha convincingly explain to @TedNesi and @TimWhiteRI how handing 80% of health care market share over to one entity would decrease quality and increase costs.
Exactly the same with our current K12 system but somehow that’s just fine?
Left-wing podcaster Bill Bartholomew, however, doesn’t get it:
not sure I follow the logic here from blogger/columnist Erika Sanzi, who compares fundamentals of @AGNeronha decision on proposed hospital merger to the status quo of public k12 education in RI. What am I missing?
And outgoing teachers union director Bob Walsh pretends not to get it:
I guess if we ever try to merge the current 66 separate local education agencies in Rhode Island, and the numerous private and parochial schools, into one entity we might face an objection. Or maybe it’s just a totally invalid, politically motivated, dark-money financed statement
Look, this isn’t complicated. Even a merged company has divisions with distributed decision-making. Monopolies are bad, but even so, a single company running every hospital in the state wouldn’t require every decision to go up to the central office. Indeed, necessity would demand that most day-to-day decisions would be made by each hospital in much the same manner as independent organizations. The differences would be in things like uniform employment arrangements, consistent rules for particular procedures or treatments, centralized bill collection, redistribution of resources across the system as managers deem necessary, and so on.
The problem with monopolies is that anybody who doesn’t like any of those one-for-all rules, whether as an employee, a customer, or a vendor/supplier, has no options. That person is trapped. This is particularly problematic in healthcare, because many of the services we buy are not really optional, and (although holistic medicine believers may disagree) self-treatment isn’t always feasible.
This is very much the situation we have in education. Even were they inclined to be neglectful, parents are required by law to see that their children are educated. The “choice” between districts requires the massive disruption of moving. And the combined force of state mandates and statewide labor unions operating across districts imposes some substantial uniform policies throughout public schooling.
As for the control of the market, when I built an economic model to project the effects of school choice policy using 2012 data, I found that district schools controlled 85% of the enrollment market, with private school and homeschooling taking about 12% and charter schools and other independent public schools claiming the remaining 3%.
Remember, also, that left-wingers like Bartholomew and Walsh tend to want more centralization of policy and resource-redistribution across the system than we already have! They also tend to want to limit access to the alternative 15%, while also extending more centralized policies to them.
So, back to Sanzi’s question: If monopoly on this scale isn’t acceptable for healthcare, why is it for education?
Featured image by MChe Lee on Unsplash.
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2-14Calenda.mp4 from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Attorney Charles Calenda is seeking election to the AG’s office out of concern for how the office has been run under incumbent AG Peter Neronha. These concerns are discussed along with gun laws in general, in particular Red Flag Laws and prohibition of guns on school grounds, the proposed hospital merger, a change of requirements of mail ballot voting, the use of executive orders by governor legalization of recreational marijuana, restructuring the AG’s office, and some interesting considerations pertaining to driver licenses for illegal immigrants, and more.
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Karen Straughan gives the Canadian perspective on the “highly embarrassing” actions of her country’s government.
Featured image by Gaia Armellin on Unsplash.
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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 that one example, the romance shouldn’t obscure big underlying problems. I have in mind these comments from Shorey:
“If we lose local news coverage, we’re doomed,” Shorey said. “People need to realize that having someone in the community, it connects people. It holds government accountable.”
“If we’re not there, nobody’s telling the story,” he added.
I don’t know how many people still buy that image of reporters’ being a connective tissue in the body politic. Yes, the gathering and dissemination of information is an important institution in a community, but it’s become too obvious that journalists pick sides, sometimes in proportion to their involvement with the community.
Shorey is correct to note that if journalists aren’t there, nobody’s telling important stories. For many of us, however, the experience has been that they often let some stories go untold, while amplifying others, for apparently political reasons. It is very easy — even to the point of being subconscious — for them to adjust the degree to which they hold government accountable based on which party or group happens to be in control.
In Tiverton, for example, elected officials are trampling all over the rights guaranteed under our town charter, but the only way anybody will ever know about it is if those of us in the opposition do the work of investigating, explaining, and promoting the facts. That’s partly our responsibility, to be sure, but the contrast with local journalists’ excitement at having someone to hold accountable for nothing when we held a narrow majority of one of the governing bodies is impossible to miss.
I won’t claim to have conducted a study of the matter, but my impression in my neck of the woods is that a sizable portion of the community has simply stopped paying attention to — and contributing to — local media for that reason. The market for local journalism is small enough, as it is, without deciding that a much of your addressable community is simply not worthy of consideration while the other side isn’t deserving of scrutiny.
This atrophy is moving up to the statewide media, too. Every now and then, a news organization may make some noise about increasing its demographic diversity, but that’s an ideological move, not a market-driven one. I’ve seen no evidence that any of the major papers or networks is interested in taking steps to attract and reassure people who don’t share their left-moderate-to-progressive beliefs. There’s no outreach. There’s no dedicated beat or columnists. Nothing.
In fairness, they have reasonable concerns that key players and sources of information in the state might shut them out if they break ranks. But that goes right back to the dubious pretense that journalists are some sort of guardians of the people.
If the suits decide that they can’t take that risk in order to gain access to deplorables’ money (or the advertising their attention could sell), that’s their prerogative, but insisting that “people need to realize” their importance doesn’t address the reason they may be doomed.
Featured image by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.
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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 is to make “wage theft” a felony. Moreover, obscuring the terms does a disservice to business owners and their advocates, because their opposition to the legislation looks like it’s either missing the point or inhumane.
Neither Patrick Anderson, in the Providence Journal, nor Edward Fitzpatrick, in the Boston Globe, addresses the confusion. Worse, Fitzpatrick buys so thoroughly into the union word game as to call misclassification a “type of wage theft.”
Fitzpatrick is not, let’s say, being very accurate. Legislation submitted by Attorney General Peter Neronha last year uses the term, “wage theft,” only in its brief summary, where it explicitly excludes misclassification: “wage theft or misclassification” (emphasis added). In actuality, the more-inflammatory phrase is never defined in the law.
The unions and journalists are, in other words, giving away the next step in their advocacy. The most consequential aspect of Neronha’s bill is arguably that, for the first time, it incorporates the “misclassification” section into the “violations” section (which is where “wage theft” would be, if it were anywhere). Doing so is unnecessary for the purpose of the bill and, honestly, confusing, indicating that either the bill was sloppily drafted or is merely a step in an already planned roll-out.
Absolutely nobody is saying that employers should not be penalized for deliberately withholding pay their employees are due. That is “wage theft.” Job classification is a different matter altogether.
For years, I worked alongside tradesmen who were indistinguishable from the other employees on the crew, but they were independent contractors. For their own reasons, they preferred that arrangement. It can give them more employment flexibility, for one thing, and they can often negotiate for higher hourly pay because they are saving the employer various expenses and costs imposed by government.
That is not “wage theft,” unless we’re considering the government to have a claim on all “wages.” Ahh… maybe we’re getting closer to the spirit of the bill.
Here’s the bottom line: Unions want the labor market to be rigid and uniform so that they can rely on political connections without having to compete for contracts as they sell negotiation services, contract defense services, and government lobbying services to workers. In the private sector, that suite of offerings doesn’t sell well, in part because more-nimble, more-flexible competitors can underbid the union shops to customers.
The legislation that the unions, Neronha, and apparently mainstream journalists support is simply part of an effort to make it more difficult for private-sector companies to continue practices that are working for them, for their customers, and for the men and women who ultimately perform the work. The activism is becoming urgent as it becomes increasingly apparent that the future of work looks a lot more like independent contracting than mass-organized unionization.
In those terms, this is precisely the approach — protecting established special interests — that we’re seeing wreak havoc in healthcare, both with nurse shortages and with hospital-merger controversies. We have to stop falling for the tricks.
Featured image by Scott Blake on Unsplash.
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