Author: sherlockj
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Out-of-State Nursing Home Chains Continue to Plague Virginia – A New Solution
By James C. Sherlock Nursing home chains headquartered in New Jersey, New York, and Atlanta have, in the last decade, plagued Virginia with their operations here to a degree that should have proven intolerable to the Governor and the General Assembly. New Jersey-based Medical Facilities of America (MFA) is both the largest and the worst-performing…
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Some of Virginia’s Worst Nursing Homes are Being Sold
by James C. Sherlock One discerning group of investors in the real estate-with-nursing-home-tenants business appears to hire operating chain-management companies exclusively from those headquartered in the Lakewood, New Jersey, area. The chains compete, but are all run by the same small circle of acquaintances. That background is meaningful because five of Lakewood-based Medical Facilities of…
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Ask the Real Questions about Nursing Homes in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock This author is tired of hearing that the left has compassion for poor people. The left that runs Richmond just completed another session in which they refused to face our nursing home crisis. They claim to prioritize the concerns of minorities, but pretend that Medicaid long-term residential care is somehow…
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What Caregivers of Autistic Children Should Know
by James C. Sherlock Parents, grandparents, and other caregivers of autistic children must understand who will actually be treating the child and monitor the services so that the rules of the insurer, which are important to the child’s outcome, are followed. Many of the Board Certified Applied Behavioral Analysts (BCABA) licensed in Virginia live in…
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Surf’s Up! And So’s Exposure to Virginia Beach Taxpayers
The biggest wave generated by the city’s Atlantic Park project is debt. The promised tax revenues aren’t sufficient yet to support it. by James C. Sherlock From an article by Stacy Parker in The Virginian-Pilot this morning: To build two parking garages and improve streets in Atlantic Park, a public entity borrowed $53 million and…
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Getting Control of Nursing Home and Autism-Treatment Chains
by James C. Sherlock Virginia is awash with out-of-state nursing home and behavior-analysis chains operating as LLCs. Our state regulators know little to nothing about them and have no control over their presence in Virginia because they are not licensed by those regulators. The problems we are experiencing in both industries are centered on rogue…
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Perhaps the Governor Can Lead Campaign Finance Reform
by James C. Sherlock Organizing for Virginia Seniors, a pop-up PAC formed by New Jersey nursing home chain owners with uniformly awful facilities in Virginia, gave Gov. Spanberger $100,000 with a check written to her “Inaugural Committee” the day before the General Assembly met. This author wrote about that donation in January and asked…
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Widespread Inaccuracies of Records on Autism Treatment Providers
By James C. Sherlock The author has completed a detailed survey of individual Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) providers in New Jersey licensed by Virginia Medicaid to provide services to children with autism. He picked New Jersey for reasons familiar to readers of his work on nursing home chains. The survey revealed that most of those…
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Did Anyone Even Notice?
by James C. Sherlock As a good citizen, this author was about to send a courtesy copy of today’s article, “Autism in Virginia,” to the Virginia Behavior Analyst Advisory Board, which helps the Board of Medicine regulate licensed behavior analysts. He found that the Behavior Analyst Advisory Board hadn’t met in a year. It…
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Autism in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock Autism therapy is the wild west of medical qualifications and spending. Autism is real, but industry professionals and the non-profits who lobby for limitless autism spending have richly earned widespread skepticism of the industry by not policing their own. They have created a closed loop for eternally increased spending: The profession…
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Nobody Home
by James C. Sherlock Last week, I conducted a short field survey in Virginia Beach of four businesses registered with the federal government to bill Medicaid as providers of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) (i.e., autism) services. Each is headquartered in Lakewood, NJ. Lakewood is, of course, the location of the Medical Facilities of…
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Autism-related Vulnerability of Virginia Medicaid
by James C. Sherlock Virginia is not doing enough to prevent Medicaid fraud. Our attempts are hampered by the dysfunctional design of the state regulatory system. They often fail because they cannot work. This piece will focus on behavioral health and recommend specific actions, but the entire healthcare regulatory system needs an overhaul. Absent that,…
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Summer Dangers
by James C. Sherlock This weekend is the unofficial start of summer, and summer and early fall weather can induce disasters in this state. We’ll look at the hurricane threat to all of Virginia, not just the coasts. Coasts. Hurricanes get the most press and preparations on the coasts. Hampton Roads homeowners expect the…
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An Untimely Endorsement for Louise Lucas
This author has just noted that Louise Lucas’s cannabis stores in Portsmouth and Norfolk, both raided by the FBI last week, are not registered with the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority. Perhaps they do not have to register. The Portsmouth store advertises Vape cartridges and tincture oil, not medical marijuana. But one of the featured…
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Potential Investigations of Louise Lucas, Lisa Lucas-Burke, Lucas Lodge and The Cannabis Outlet
by James C. Sherlock In an interview Sunday in the Virginian-Pilot, Sen. Louise Lucas, president pro tempore of the Virginia state senate, says she still doesn’t know why the feds raided her businesses. We will look at the possibilities. Senator Lucas has a right to due process and a presumption of innocence. But there are…