Category: Health Care
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Carilion’s Opportunity to Advance the Knowledge About COVID
by James A. Bacon Roanoke-based Carilion Clinic, the leading health care system in western Virginia, will try using the carrot and the stick in a campaign to elevate the percentage of employees who have been vaccinated for COVID-19, reports The Roanoke Times. Vaxxed employees will receive $150 in their Oct. 15 paycheck, while unvaxxed employees will be…
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What Does Northam’s Masking Order Mean for 70,000 School Kids with Disabilities? Does Northam Even Know?
by James C. Sherlock My own preferred policy for schools is mandatory vaccination for school staff, recommended vaccinations for the kids and voluntary masks for everyone. One of the advantages of that is that it is executable. One of the disadvantages is that I have no influence whatever over the governor or health commissioner. Pretty…
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How to Promote the Home Healthcare Revolution
by James A. Bacon Before the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals and outpatient clinics accounted for 99% of all medical visits. That share has dropped during the pandemic to about 90% as emergency conditions stimulated the adoption of telemedicine and in-home treatment. As the epidemic recedes (assuming it does recede), medical care could well shift back to…
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A COVID Report From Southside
by Dick Hall-Sizemore With the exception of Carol, the contributors to Bacon’s Rebellion (and, I am guessing, most of the commenters) are in the NoVA, Richmond, Hampton Roads bubble. Therefore, I thought it would be enlightening to bring in some COVID news from my home area, Halifax County, in Southside. The first is an article…
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Are We Willing to Require Health Care Workers to Get Vaccinated If There Are No Replacements?
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes reality trumps policy. The headline asks a question for which I do not have an answer. My personal position is that all health care workers and all school workers should get vaccinated. Reality suggests that changing the verb from “should” to “must” depends on the availability of replacements, the necessity of…
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Return to Autocracy in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock. Updated Aug 13, 12:15 PM It was so easy to predict that I can claim no special prescience. I wrote a week ago: “The Governor’s 15-month emergency powers expired June 30, and, God, does he miss them…. (H)ow long (will the) governor put up with the lack of emergency powers?” If…
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Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? Virginia’s 211 – Service or Crapshoot?
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes the government of Virginia just makes you want to scream, cry, stay under the covers, whatever. Navigating government and private social services agencies when you need help is hard, even more so a crisis. But it is way harder in Virginia than it needs to be. To streamline the navigation…
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Virginia’s Continuing Mental Health Crisis
by James C. Sherlock I like government at every level to address only things it must. Then I want it to be world class in efficiency and effectiveness. It has been clear since the ’60’s that I am destined to be repeatedly frustrated on both counts. We come to an old issue in Virginia, the…
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Northam Asks Good Questions About Amended Medicaid Budget
by James C. Sherlock Governor Ralph Northam has raised an important issue relative to the budget negotiations. He has asked that the final bill not include an extension of a 12.5% increase in rates for Medicaid home- and community-based services for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The General Assembly put it in there anyway. …
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The Accelerating Scale of the Legislate-Regulate-Spend-and-Repeat Cycle Has Broken Government
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in Corruption and Scandals, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, General Assembly, Governance, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Mental illness and substance abuse, Money in politics, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlementsby James C. Sherlock Virginians – the state and individual citizens – have received over $81 billion in COVID-related federal funding. That comes to $9,507 for every man, woman and child in the Commonwealth. Big money. That was Virginia’s share of $5.3 trillion in federal spending just on the pandemic (so far). A trillion dollars…
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No PAC for Disaster Preparedness and Response
by James C. Sherlock Virginia’s responses to COVID were a continuing national embarrassment. Individual Virginia department and agencies had no operational pandemic response plans. They ignored specific and prescient directions to build and exercise such plans in the dormant Virginia Pandemic Emergency Plan. VDEM then attempted a coverup. No PPE stockpiles. Last in testing. Last in…
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Congrats UVa Health and Centra – the Right Kind of Healthcare Affiliation
by James C. Sherlock Now for a kind word for my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Virginia. In a press release yesterday, Lynchburg-based Centra and UVA Health announced a strategic clinical affiliation. From what we know from the announcement, that is exactly the kind of healthcare affiliation Virginians need.
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In Virginia, Only Inova, UVa Health and VA Hospitals Mandate Vaccinations for Staff
by James C. Sherlock Among large Virginia health systems, only Inova, UVa Health and VA Medical Centers appear currently to mandate staff vaccinations. Inova is the only one of those that is private. On Monday, a Joint Statement in Support of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates for All Workers in Health and Long-Term Care was issued by a long…
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COVID and Labor Shortages Are Aggravating Virginia’s Mental Health Crisis
by James A. Bacon The story made big headlines earlier this month when the Northam administration announced that five of the Commonwealth’s eight mental health institutions have stopped taking new patients. Two things are happening to make a chronically bad situation worse. First, the number of patients referred to state hospitals through Temporary Detention Orders…
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What Would We Do Without Experts and “People Familiar with the Matter”?
by James C. Sherlock Headline: “The CDC is expected to recommend that fully vaccinated people begin wearing masks indoors again in places with high Covid-19 transmission rates, according to people familiar with the matter.” Einstein had it right. But, then, he went to in-person school.