Category Archives: Consumer protection

Consumer protection

Data Shows Hospital Billing Outrages

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 4 Comments

Hospital BillBy Peter Galuszka

It’s long been fascinating how Big Hospitals, linked with Medicare, Big Pharma and Big Managed Care, have come up with an extraordinarily convoluted system of setting prices for various hospital procedures.

There is plenty of nonsense about including on this blog about bringing “free market efficiencies” to health care, as if human health is something like a widget or a jet engine fan blade that can be made cheaper and faster if you only got the right consulting firm to hit the right formula and the right software and the right system and the right package and kept the evil government out of it, everything would come up roses.

So to see how stupid and impractical the idea is, I was amused to see the big data base release on hospital cost charges for various procedures by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It covers what was billed and what was paid by hundreds of hospitals for 100 procedures.

Big Health Care did not want the data released because they prefer working in an office with the shutters drawn as they try to game the Medicare system by overbilling and then cutting secretive deals with Big Managed Care over what they’ll really charge for group policy holders and screw the rest.

President Obama had the CMMS release the data to show what a sham setting hospital prices is, although it is doubtful that ObamaCare that goes into full effect next year will change things much. I believe more and more that socialized medicine is the only way to go.

Anyway, here is a short piece I did for Style Weekly that looks at what Richmond area hospitals actually charge for Medicare and what they get:

If you’re a Medicare patient and need a major joint replaced — perhaps a hip — consider the initial cost.

In 2011, HCA Healthcare’s CJW Medical Center billed Medicare $117,477 and got about $12,926 from the government. Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center billed $55,327 and got $20,308. Bon Secours Memorial Hospital charged $53,195, and got $12,458.

Sound screwy? It is. For all the talk about a free-market system, setting health care prices is anything but.

Instead of open bidding, think of hospital officials meeting behind closed doors, strategizing how much to charge to get reimbursed. Medicare, which usually represents about half of a hospital’s revenues, sets a fixed rate for various procedures. But hospitals can’t by law offer a specific set of prices for just Medicare.

So they factor in other price variables such as what insurance companies might pay on a percentage basis. A big insurer may pay only 20 percent of charges or what they negotiate privately. That automatically jacks up the asking price. Another variable is getting financial aid to help pick up the bill for indigents.

Moreover, higher prices don’t necessarily mean better quality, says Michael Spine, senior vice president for business development at Bon Secours Health System.

What results is an incredibly skewed set of prices for essentially the same procedures. That’s the takeaway from a survey by the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which shows what hospitals billed Medicare — and what Medicare paid — for procedures in 100 categories in 2011. The Obama administration released the survey to drum up support for the Affordable Health Care Act, which takes full effect next year.

A glance at the survey shows that CJW Medical Center was by far the priciest on some procedures, but also reimbursed the least.

Take kidney-tract infections, for example. CJW filed $30,552 while MCV asked for $19,819. Yet MCV got more. For some heart-failure cases, HCA billed $40,274 while St. Mary’s Hospital, owned by nonprofit Bon Secours, billed $18,460. And St. Mary’s was reimbursed more. Go figure.

Because insurance companies base policies around what Medicare is billed and will pay for, just about everyone’s affected. Those without insurance could be stuck with the entire bill, although they can receive treatment free or through discounts.

“Hospital charges vary because they reflect the individual hospital’s mission, the patient population it serves and the subsidies necessary to provide essential public services,” says Anne Buckley, a spokeswoman for VCU Medical Center.

Mark Foust, a spokesman for HCA, says a “patient’s medical coverage — rather than charges — is what primarily drives what he or she pays a hospital.”

HCA and VCU help poor patients with their bills through discount or charity programs. So does Bon Secours, says Spine, who adds that releasing the results of such surveys is an important step in moving from “legacy” pricing to something more transparent.

Next on Obama’s list: releasing surveys of physicians’ fees.

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Posted in Children and families, Consumer protection, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Economy, Federal, Health care, Insurance, Politics, Science & Technology, Social services

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GiftGate: “If I Were a Rich Man . . .!”

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Richmond’s “Giftgate” scandal just gets worse.

On Friday, Atty. Gen. and presumed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Cuccinelli announced that he was amending his required disclosures of gifts to show that he took more goodies from Star Scientific plus previously undisclosed gifts of a $7,750 trip in 2010 to Southwest Virginia from coal giant Alpha Natural Resources of Abingdon and $795 to speak at a coal industry rally in 2012.

While the tardy disclosure is questionable, the gifts are not illegal but they would be in other states.

This, moreover, raises another tricky question. How wealthy should politicians be so they can’t be bought?

Could it be that officials  of more modest personal means such as Cuccinelli might be somehow be more vulnerable to gift-giving by individuals or corporations with a definite agenda, such as Star Scientific and Alpha Natural Resources.

Cuccinelli disclosed income of $134,000 in 2009 and $264,296 in 2005. He makes about $150,000 as the state’s top legal officer and got a $30,000 advance from Crown Publishing for a book. His disclosure was a political ploy to embarrass McAuliffe but in the wake of the gifts, it has backfired.

McDonnell’s net worth is about $1.8 million.

Compare that to two Democrats. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, no stranger to big money fundraising, earned $8.2 million in 2011 from his various business interests. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner was once said to be worth about $200 million, much of it from investments he made in the cell phone industry and high-tech financing a couple of decades ago.

It’s tough to say that politics should be only for rich men. But the curious thing about these two Republicans, supposedly the silk stocking, country club party, is that McDonnell and Cuccinelli “are actually very much middle class guys,” Richmond political analyst Bob Holsworth recently told me.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the fact is that both Cuccinelli and McDonnell have spent most of their careers in low-paying public service jobs. McAuliffe and Warner, both accused of being anti-capitalist regulators by the GOP, actually made millions in the free market system that they supposedly disdain.

Painting them as such might be a plus to rank and file voters, but in a strange way, it can put them at risk. Why, for instance, did Cuccinelli feel compelled to accept $13,000 in gifts from Jonnie Williams, the head of troubled Star Scientific, which is the object of shareholder lawyers and a federal probe? These included the use of vacation homes and expensive foreign cars. One vacation cost $3,000 and was a gift. Even an underpaid journalist like myself has paid $2,000 for a week at a beach house with my family. Why couldn’t he have rented his own place?

Williams is involved with a disputed state tax assessment of $860,000 and Cucccinelli has had to recuse himself as he has from another court case involving the fired executive chef who is seeking information that McDonnell’s family used publicly-funded goods like energy drinks, state-owned beach cottages and liquor for themselves.

The Alpha and coal business is rather obvious. Alpha took over Richmond-based Massey Energy in 2011 after the firm’s noxious corporate culture is said to have led to the deaths of 29 miners in West Virginia making it the worst deep mine disaster in the U.S. in 40 years. Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship was famous for bankrolling West Virginia judicial officials and other candidates. He went so far as  to vacation with the State Supreme Court Judge on the French Riviera.

Alpha has a better safety record than Massey but is taking its lumps, having lost $2 billion in one quarter last year. Coal in general has been in the tank thanks to cheap natural gas and some new federal environmental rules plus a slow-down in Asia’s demand for coal to make steel.

Naturally, the beleaguered coal industry wants to beat back what it considers onerous regulations.  It was a major bankroller of Mitt Romney’s campaign last year and Alpha was a big participant. Cuccinelli is perfect because he denies that carbon dioxide is responsible for climate change – a pet issue for King Coal. So, he was instrumental in the right wing’s counter attacks on the “War On Coal” last election.

What bothers me is not that Cuccinelli would flack for them but why did it cost $7,750 for him and his parents, paid for by Alpha, to visit Southwest Virginia. Last year I published a book on Massey and had made many trips to Southwest Virginia, including Alpha’s headquarters and a mine. I paid for it myself and I think it cost me maybe $200 in gas and a night or two at a two star motel at maybe $110 a night. I ate at Hardees where a steak biscuit is about $1.50 although I did splurge at a fancy Abingdon restaurant that had knock-out martinis with blue cheese filled olives.

But it didn’t cost me $7,750 or even one third of that.

Would McAuliffe or Warner have accepted a such largesse? I am sure they have moved and grooved with the rich and famous for years but both men are in a position to say “no thanks.”

And that is what Cuccinelli and McDonnell should have said, even if Virginia has hardly any rules on gifts.

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Posted in Abortion, Children and families, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Economic development, Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal, Finance, Governance reform, Money in politics, Politics

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The Tumbling Tots of Sydney

Posted on March 26, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 3 Comments

Back away from that window, kid. Nice and easy now…

by James A. Bacon

“Smart growth kills children!” quipped email correspondent Ron Utt yesterday. He proffered the sly comment in passing along a blog post describing how 169 children in Sydney, Australia, plunged from high-rise windows or balustrades to serious injury or death between 1998 and 2008.

In the New Geography blog post that Ron cited, Tony Recsei writes:

Apartments are especially unsuitable for bringing up very young children. … Crawling and walking is stymied due to space problems with children having little access to areas for meaningful activity. There is a lack of safe active play space outside the home. Parks and other public open space offer poor security due to the use of these areas by local youth gangs and the socially dysfunctional.

Over the past decade, the goal of the New South Wales Government has been that more than half of the population of NSW be squeezed into apartments by the year 2030. These high-density policies have placed a restrictive growth boundary around Sydney, and have been enforced by stripping away the planning powers of those local authorities that dared to offer any resistance.

The government solution to the tumbling tots? Mandate window safety locks.

This is what happens when progressives hijack the smart growth movement. Leftists are constitutionally inclined to impose their vision of the public good on others. If smart growth is beneficial, impose it through top-down government policy. Consumer preferences can be safely ignored — the people don’t know what’s good for them.

No wonder conservatives are so allergic to smart growth!

While the story of the nose-diving nippers may discredit “smart growth” in the eyes of some, to me it reinforces why conservatives need to re-define the term in their own idiom. Smart growth = more efficient human settlement patterns. There is nothing intrinsically liberal or conservative about the idea of efficient human settlement patterns, only how you achieve them. There are few real leftists here in Virginia. The smart growth advocates of my acquaintance do not advocate urban growth boundaries or herding the reluctant masses into high-rises — what they advocate is allowing people who want to live in high-rises to do so, which means rolling back outdated density restrictions. Smart growth is a much more mainstream movement in the Old Dominion, and we are unlikely to see the Sydney experience replicated here.

Update: For what it’s worth, Sydney, Australia, is not the only place where children fall out of windows. Window falls injure about 5,100 children on average each year in the United States, according to WebMD Health News.

Let’s do the numbers. The population of Sydney is 4.6 million, or about 1.5% of the total U.S. population. The number of plunging papooses averages 17 per year, about 0.3% of the U.S number…. or about one-fifth what we would expect if munchkins fell from windows at a random rate. Hmmm…. There may be even less to this story than meets the eye!

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Posted in 2013, Children and families, Consumer protection, Land use & development

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“I Got Mine from Mah Daddy!”

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

One of the stranger attributes of Virginia’s conservatives is their cheesy, Calvinist streak.

Their world view tends to celebrate the rich and powerful, regardless of whether the individual worked diligently and creatively to generate the wealth or if it was inherited. For example, one man (not a Virginian) whom I respect described the attitudes of the old Richmond elite this way: “I got mine from mah Daddy and to hell with everybody else!”

This form of self-entitlement stretches into making moral judgments. If someone is poor and perhaps sick, then it is their fault. They have not punished themselves enough. They have not worked hard enough. If you give them too much, they will just stay that way.

Which brings me to a Washington Post editorial this morning that really rang true. It notes that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell had to be bludgeoned by Democrats into expanding Medicaid for the poor in order to get his convoluted but needed tax hikes to help save the state’s road system.

Why was this quid pro quo necessary? Good question.

Virginia, the Post notes, is a top 10 state for wealth but is No. 48 in per capita spending on Medicaid which protects needy, low income people who can’t afford health insurance. ObamaCare would let the states expand coverage to 400,000 Virginians who need help. The feds will pick up the tab for the first three years and 90 percent to 2020.  Later, it’s a half-half split. Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio have gone along with the expansion, seeing little value in denying the needy.

So why was McDonnell holding his nose?

Because hard right conservatives with a Calvinist streak have too much power, that’s why. McDonnell is paying a price for his tax hikes on roads. The Conservative Political Action Conference, for instance, is not inviting him to their upcoming confab. Arch rival and conservative Ken Cuccinelli is invited.

At the end of the day, who cares what the hard-right thinks? The point is to help the poor, especially when a rich state like Virginia can help.

As conservatives gnash their teeth after their November drubbing and try to find a new bearing point (or drift as the case may be), they need to come to a better idea of compassion.

It might not go down well with the Baconauts and Boomergeddons, but flinty Calvinism and strict dogma on lifestyles, income levels and immigration are not the future. Just ask the millions of Hispanic-Americans in this country who did not exactly support Mitt Romney.

What’s needed in this state is more compassion, not more lectures on how to be successful from the right wing chattering upper classes who probably got their’s from Daddy and Mommy anyway.

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Posted in Budget, Children and families, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Entitlements, Federal, Health care, Immigration, Politics

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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 21 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children.

Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly needed money for transportation although it came via a very bad law that ties itself up like a contortionist doing this and that when all that needed to be done was to simply raise the gasoline tax for the first time in 26 years.

The Democrats were right to strong-arm McDonnell into going along with expanding Medicaid. It would have been absolutely ridiculous for Virginia to hold its stubborn head high and deny thousands of needy people medical assistance so they can feel good about some ludicrous oath from Grover Norquist they may have recited at one point to get votes. The feds will be paying for the expansion until 2016 and then for 90 percent of it. Imagine a well fed delegate saying, “No, you poor person can’t have health care because it is doctrinally impure!”

The upshot is is that we need to get of the Grover Norquists, the Tea Baggers and all their ilk to get on with the serious business of running the state and country. The sequestration debacle is more than embarrassing for its stupidity. So is Kenneth Cuccinelli with Bob Marshall cheering him to to find any bogus constitutional challenge to anything he finds political impure as far as taxation.

The bottom line is that if you want fixed roads, good schools and a decent place to live, you have to pay for them through taxes. Simple. You can’t depend on private industry to see you through, especially not when a good chunk of it in the Old Dominion is actually federal government money that’s about to be cut off in a big way. You can’t do it through little shell games with public private partnerships to build roads you often do not need. And you just can’t kick the can to younger generations so you can remain holy.

In other words, the days of the Tea Party, “Boomergeddon” and all the clarion calls to the need for budget cutting are over. They’ve been over for a while. We get it. We’ve been spending too much. But it is idiotic to go cold turkey without some thought given to it because you will crash the economy and die of the DTs. You don’t cure a crash victim by denying him blood. That’s not voodoo economics, that’s vampire economics. You need a balance and that’s exactly what the Boomergeddons and Baconauts want to deny us.

As for McDonnell, well, he’s finally got his legacy. It looks pretty messy. He did manage to get more money for roads, but he did through a Rube Goldberg contraption of taxation. He has a totally wrong-headed tax on alternative vehicles which shows,once again, just how Neanderthal much of the thinking in the General Assembly is.

McDonnell failed to get legacies through privatizing state alcohol stores or erecting offshore oil rigs. Last year, the legislature got so out of control with social conservative nonsense — another Tea Party legacy — that Virginia scored on national Snark TV for its inane war against women. That cost McDonnell a hell of a lot, namely the vice presidential nomination.

Now, he’s reportedly thinking about something bigger and I gather his platform for that will be his tax victory. Good Luck.

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Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Budget, Children and families, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Entitlements, Environment, Federal, Finance, Governance reform, Government workers and pensions, Health care, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Land use & development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulation, Social services, Taxes, The Economy, Transportation

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Peanuts, Tobacco and Corporate Greed

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 1 Comment

By Peter Galuszka

Stewart Parnell had a dilemma. The owner of Lynchburg-based Peanut Corporation of America faced deadlines in shipping peanut butter from his troubled manufacturing plant in Georgia but test results from salmonella, a problem because of unsanitary conditions at the factory, were not back from the lab yet.

His customers included schools, snack firms and dog snack makers. “Shit, just ship it,” Parnell instructed in an email.

While many are concentrate on the failings of government, not that many pay attention to the wrongdoings of private enterprise. The peanut story is a huge lesson for Virginia, based on a 76-count indictment that was handed down in Georgia on Thursday that charged Parnell and three other firm employees with a host of crimes.

Thanks to their quest for the profit, prosecutors charge, hundreds of people were made sick and nine others died in 2009 of a national outbreak of salmonella that was traced back to the peanut factory. One was a 78-year old Korean War vet who was killed after eating peanut butter at his assisted living facility in Minnesota.

The company’s problem trace to its factory in Blakely, Ga., which inspectors found infested with mold and rat feces. Food and Drug Administrators visited the plant a number of times in 2008 and 2009. Aside from the dangerously unsanitary conditions, they found evidence that Peanut Corp. officials had knowingly shipped products infested with salmonella in 2007 and 2008.

Meanwhile, in other headlines, Russia is launching on a plan to increase its citizens’ life expectancies from 66.5 years to 74 years by 2018. Two big reasons for the early death rates are alcohol and tobacco. Regarding the latter (I know from personal experience), Russians can’t live without a cigarette sticking out of their mouths and start at a very early age.

Tobacco companies, including Virginia-Based Philip Morris USA, used to take full advantage of this. True, PM split itself into USA and Philip Morris International a few years back as a sop to health related lawsuits in this country. But its freshly-independent sister firm, based in Switzerland, actively promotes high-nicotine products in Russia and other smoking-prone places such as China, India and Indonesia.

Pointing out the health hazards of tobacco are always problematic in Virginia which has based much of its economic history on tobacco since the 17th century. Philip Morris employs about 6,000 in the state and its parent firm, Altria, contributes generously to the arts and other philanthropy.

But that doesn’t change the deadly nature of its products. In the case of Peanut Corp. of America, its products should be healthy and peanuts also date many centuries in Virginia history. Until greed steps in.

And that takes us back to the essential point. In many cases, the problem is not enough government regulation instead of too much—a common mantra around this blog.

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Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Disaster planning, Economy, Federal, Governance reform, Labor & workforce, Regulation

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Is Virginia a Leader in Gun Control?

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 2 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

For all of the sound and fury over guns in Virginia — panicked shooters are draining firearms shops of ammunition — the Old Dominion actually has been a leader among states on the gun control issue on a couple of fronts.

For details, see my story in this week’s Style Weekly.

First, Richmond was in the forefront of a much-imitated program back in the 1990s called “Project Exile” which carried mandatory federal prison terms for any felon caught in a crime.

Back in the day, Richmond’s central area was racking up the second highest murder rate in the country. The problem started with an inner-city crack cocaine epidemic and then morphed into an OK Corral motif when a lot of kids started carrying guns and using them whenever their blood got hot during a macho argument.

Project Exile worked, former Richmond Police Chief Jerry Oliver told me, because it addressed “so much gun carrying among immature young males who were unschooled and unchurched.”

To be sure, there were criticisms that Project Exile had racial tinges because it was directed at mostly young African-Americans in Richmond’s central area. Civil rights lawyers told me that they watched a kid go to jail because he had a gun on him while he was caught with a marijuana joint in his pocket. At the same time, the leading proponents of Project Exile, such as Richmond’s then Commonwealth’s Attorney and Chief Oliver are also African-Americans.

Programs like these lose their relevancy in the case of mass shootings of the Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook type which involve legally-bought guns and shooters with distinct mental illnesses. Oliver told me that in many of those cases, the shooter often doesn’t care if he gets caught because he may well intend to kill himself in the fray.

What helps is keeping a federal registry with lists of names of people considered ill enough with mental issues to make themselves dangerous if they have guns. This goes on a National Instant Criminal Background Check System that licensed gun dealers need to check before selling a firearm.

The Wall Street Journal reports that many states don’t bother supplying the system with much data. But guess which state supplies the most? Virginia.

That’s right. The Old Dominion, led by former Gov. Time Kaine and then Atty. Gen. Robert F. McDonnell (bipartisanship anyone?) actually made sure that lots of names made the list after the Virginia Tech horrors.

Of course, the list is useless at gun shows where sellers and buyers don’t have a legal requirement to check someone’s background before selling a gun. That will be addressed by President Barack Obama’s reform proposals.

Virginia’s efforts are sensible measures to ensure safety with guns. You wouldn’t know by looking at the General Assembly where legislators are ripping apart any proposal for reform. As for shooters, they are cleaning out the ammo stores. What amazes me is they’re even making a run at .22 caliber Long Rifle rounds. They can be deadly but they are the type of bullet I used to use to hunt squirrels with using my bolt-action, single shot rifle when I was 11 years old. Go figure.

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Posted in Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Disaster planning, Gun rights, Health care, Media, Politics

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Regulating Uranium Mining Would Be Huge Task

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 20 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Virginia appears to be reaching a critical mass regarding uranium mining and milling in Pittsylvania County.

Today, the Uranium Working Group issued its report outlining what steps would be needed if Virginia were to lift its 30-year-old moratorium on uranium mining. Meanwhile, the powerful Virginia Farm Bureau joined a group of mining opponents including The Virginia Association of Counties, Virginia Beach and Norfolk which are strongly against lifting the ban.

Created by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, the working group spent months researching what would need to be done if the ban were lifted and Virginia Uranium applied for permits to mine some 119 million pounds of uranium ore worth possibly $7 billion near Chatham. The group did not make any recommendations but is providing information should the General Assembly take up lifting the ban in January.

The report says there are two choices. Should Virginia regulate uranium mining and milling? Or should the milling operation be handled by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission which has the authority and experience to oversee it. (The NRC does not oversee mining but milling or refining ore).

If the state takes on the regulatory responsibility, it will need substantial new government resources including roughly 30 new professionals spread across such agencies as the Department of Mines Minerals and Energy, the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Quality. They would cost maybe $5 million or more which the report says could be paid from fees charged mining firms. There wasn’t an estimate on local government costs.

The state would need authority from the NRC and that process could take three years. Only a handful of western states have it.

The state would still be involved if the NRC were to oversee milling. An environmental assessment must be done before mining operations are begun. Virginia would still have authority over air or water emissions from the uranium operation.

Uranium would take the state’s regulatory apparatus to a new level. Oversight would been needed for airborne radioactive emissions, drinking water, well-water, livestock within two miles of the operation, water for recreational swimming, worker safety, truck dust and a host of other matters. Financial safeguards in the forms of bonds would have to be paid upfront to protect against mishap plus plans for emergency responses would need to be put in place. (I’ll get into more as I digest the report).

In other words, it’s a very tall order. And, the report says it can’t be started unless the moratorium is lifted.

Interest in mining Southside Virginia uranium subsided after the ban 30 years ago but was renewed in 2007 at Coles Hill Farm when prices rebounded strongly. A new proposal by local residents and their Canadian investors has been racked by controversy ever since with company officials taking legislators on expenses-paid trips to France (Paris included), supposedly to gather information. There have been a series of studies including a couple by economists saying the proposal could bring in plenty of money and another by the National Academy of Sciences raising serious questions about safety, notably since Tidewater cities get their drinking water from lakes nearby.

If the ban is lifted, it still will be some years before Virginia could establish its complex regulatory structures if that’s what it chooses to do. Where uranium prices will be then is anyone’s guess. Spot prices for uranium yellowcake reached the mid $70s/pound level in early 2011 but took a huge tumble after the Fukushima reactor disaster in March of that year. They are now around $40/pound.

So, is it all worth the risk and hassle?

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Posted in Consumer protection, Courts and law, Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Federal, Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health care, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, The Economy

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Crime Drops, But Virginians Pack More Heat

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 30 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

Virginians have been buying more firearms than ever even though crime has been steadily falling. Why?

Last year, 420,829 firearms were bought through licensed gun dealers in Virginia. That’s a 73 percent increase from the sales in 2006. Leading the list were pistols (175,717) sold last year, followed by rifles (135,495). Central Virginians packed more heat than anyone else, followed closely by Northern Virginians, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Now comes the hard. As more firearms are sold, the crime rate continues to fall. From 2006 to 2011, violent crime committed with handguns dropped from 4,040 to 3,154, about 25 percent, the newspaper reports.

Is there a correlation between heightened gun sales and decreasing crime?

Indeed, some believe that hardened criminals are less likely to threaten victims if they know there’s a chance they could be looking down the barrel of a 9 mm. Glock or something that fits more easily into a lady’s handbag, such as a Ruger LCP 380 Ultra Compact Pistol.  By some accounts, women, as well as men, are flocking to training courses and firing ranges operated by gun stores.

At first glance, “the data is pretty overwhelming,” Thomas R. Baker, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told the Richmond newspaper.

When you take a longer view, however, the thinking tends to fall apart. According to FBI reports, violent crime has been on a fairly steady downward trend since the early 1990s – much earlier than 2006 when Virginians started buying guns like crazy. The Economist magazine says the violent crime rate is at its lowest in 40 years and the murder rate is less than it was a half a century ago.

It’s anyone’s guess why crime has continually dropped. Theories include demographic shifts in which younger, inner city men who tend to be involved in violent crime have become steadily fewer in number. Better community-based police work could be a cause. The cold-hearted even say more low-income babies are being aborted.

Gun proponents suggest that one reason for the gun fad among the law-abiding was a fear that President Barack Obama would force a severe crackdown on gun sales when he was elected in 2008. If so, it hasn’t happened yet. Some worry that the recession would bring about more crime but history shows that there was more violence in the Roaring 1920s than the Depression-racked 1930s. They also want to be ready if caught in rare yet highly publicized mass-shootings such as those at Virginia Tech and at a movie theater in Colorado.

In my view, Virginians are packing heat with gusto for the wrong reasons. They and their gun sellers are riding a wave of irrational fear that has been vigorously promoted by social conservative politicians in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Besides this, linking the desire for personal and deadly firepower to the country’s first African-American president raises some rather ugly questions.

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Posted in Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Disaster planning, Economy, Federal, Gun rights, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and race relations, Regulation

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A Market Alternative to Regulating Payday Lenders

Posted on November 19, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 6 Comments

by James A. Bacon

As Chesterfield County continues to debate how extensively to restrict payday lending — a classic manifestation of the do-gooders’ proclivity for imposing their exquisite sensibilities upon the population through government coercion — it is nice to be reminded of a positive experiment to help Virginians with short-term lending needs.

Under former Governor (now U.S. Senator-elect) Tim Kaine, Virginia state government set up the Virginia State Employee Loan Program (VSELP) in partnership with the Virginia Credit Union. Originally intended as a pilot program, VSELP proved so popular that the state has made it permanent. Writes Heather Kerrigan for Governing magazine.

Under VSELP, employees can borrow between $100 and $500 in increments of $100 without a credit check and without reporting to the credit bureaus. Employees can take out up to two loans each year, but can only have one out at a time. The loans must be paid back over six months, with payments coming straight out of employees’ paychecks and into the credit union.

The short-term loans offer a relatively low interest rate, about 25% annualized, compared to rates as high as 584% for some payday loans. The state has issued  nearly 8,400 loans since the program began — more than than $9 million in all.

Grafted onto an existing credit union, the program is inexpensive to administer. Only one full-time worker is required to run it. Admittedly, the state has one big advantage that payday lenders do not — the ability to recapture repayments straight out of employees’ paychecks, which eliminates the risk of default.

Bacon’s bottom line: Kudos to the commonwealth for developing a plan that serves the emergency financial needs of its employees. That is the preferable way to deal with the scourge of payday loans — innovation and competition. By providing a superior product, the commonwealth increases, not restricts, the array of consumer choices.

Instead of trying to regulate payday lenders out of existence  the goo-goos should stifle their authoritarian impulses and seek ways to provide a better emergency-loan service at a lower price. They can look to VSELP as a model.

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Posted in 2012, Consumer protection, Finance

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