Category: Consumer Protection
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COPN’s Regional Monopolies Helped Boost Virginia Hospitals’ Operating Margins to more than 3x National Median in 2020
by James C. Sherlock Virginians have been assured forever by the hospital lobby that the non-profit regional monopolies established and protected by COPN nearly everywhere but Richmond: are benign public servants with a charitable mission; certainly don’t drive up costs; that competition does not matter; that the State Medical Facilities Plan on which COPN is…
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HB 646 on Nursing Home Staffing Misses the Mark – So Does Its Fiscal Impact Statement
by James C. Sherlock There is a bill, HB 646, Nursing homes; standards of care and staff requirements, regulations in the General Assembly. I support its intent. As written it specifies minimum hours of direct care services for each resident per 24-hour period. In actuality, numbers of personnel required to provide the services depend upon the…
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Bill Creates, Protects Right to Natural Gas Service
by Steve Haner Efforts to repeal or amend the Virginia Clean Economy Act are not the only bills pending at this 2022 General Assembly to mount a bit of defense against The War on Fossil Fuels. If the City of Richmond decides in the future to close its municipal natural gas utility, a step its…
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Were Herring’s Last Actions as AG Racist?
by James A. Bacon Attorney General Mark Herring wound up his last day in office today with an announcement that he is holding three more gas stations “accountable” for alleged price gouging during the Colonial Pipeline emergency in the spring of 2021, bringing the total to six enforcement actions. As I noted in a previous…
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Medical Facility State Inspector Shortfalls An Urgent Matter for the Governor and General Assembly
by James C. Sherlock Virginians are blessed to have a person running the Department of Health Office of Licensure and Inspection (OLC) who may be the best public servant in the Commonwealth. She desperately needs help to do the work she is assigned in order to protect us. Kim Beazley, the Director of that Office,…
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Should Choice of Supplier Extend to Natural Gas?
by Steve Haner Should there be retail choice for natural gas? The developers of a proposed natural gas-fired merchant electricity plant are testing the waters with a proposal to bypass their local monopoly supplier by building their own one-customer pipeline to another source. In the electricity arena, this is an old issue as large industrial…
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McAuliffe Promise to Accelerate VCEA Schedule Will Accelerate VCEA Consumer Bill Increases
by Steve Haner When a State Corporation Commission staff analysis warned last year of $808 annual increases in Dominion Energy Virginia residential bills by 2030, that 58% increase was based on the existing deadlines set for Dominion’s conversion away from using fossil fuels. Change the deadlines, change the cost. Shorten the deadlines by half, as…
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Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis – Part 3 – McAuliffe & Herring
by James C. Sherlock In the first two parts of this series, I wrote about the shortage of state inspectors for nursing homes in the Virginia Department of Health Office of Licensure and Certification (OLC) and the continuing danger it poses to Virginia patients. The problem, unfortunately, is much wider than just nursing homes. So…
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Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis — Part 2, the Business
by James C. Sherlock Nursing homes are businesses. Seventy percent of those in Virginia are for profit. They are run not by doctors but registered nurses with physicians on call. Nursing facilities very widely in size in Virginia, from the 300-bed Mulberry Creek Nursing and Rehab center in Martinsville to facilities of less than 30…
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SCC Staff: Dominion Should Refund $312M, Cut Rates, Due to $1.14B Excess Profits
by Steve Haner Customers of Dominion Energy Virginia are due a refund of $312 million and the company’s future base rates should be reduced by another $50 million annually, the utility accounting staff at the State Corporation Commission concluded in testimony filed September 17. Patrick W. Carr, deputy director of the division of utility accounting…
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Richmond Wants to Kill Its Gas Utility, Also Ending Service in Henrico, Chesterfield
by Steve Haner BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the (Richmond) Council hereby commits to working with the City’s Administration on an equitable plan to phase out reliance on gas and shift to accelerated investment in City-owned renewable energy and hereby recognizes that the continued operation of the City’s gas utility is an obstacle to the…
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Nantucket Wind Suit May Have Virginia Echoes
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. A group of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts residents have filed suit challenging the pre-construction environmental review on a massive offshore wind complex planned off its shores. The issues raised may have a direct impact on the similar wind energy project planned off…
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Marijuana and Casino Legalization Linked to Increases in Mental Illness and Substance Abuse
by James C. Sherlock We know what is going to happen. Dr. Daniel Carey M.D., Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, will soon apply to the federal government for funding for substance abuse prevention grants. He knows. He plans to tell the federal government that additional people, mostly poor and Black, are going to…
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Herring Sues Minority Gas Station Owners for Price-Gouging
by James A. Bacon Attorney General Mark Herring has filed a lawsuit against the owners of a Springfield gas station for charging “unconscionable” prices for gasoline after the temporary shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline in May. “Bad actors will take advantage of times of crises to unreasonably increase prices for necessary goods, like gasoline,” said…
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Delta – 8 THC and the Government’s Marijuana Plans Go “Up in Smoke”
Is cannabis legal in Virginia? Most followers of this blog are aware of the recent legislative efforts in Virginia to decriminalize and then legalize the possession of intoxicating marijuana by adults. Most followers of this blog believe that Virginia is presently in a twilight world where recreational possession of intoxicating marijuana is legal while the…