Category Archives: Federal

The Virginia State Budget and the Rising Costs of Registered Nurses

Posted on September 4, 2023 by | 7 comments

by James C. Sherlock

I was asked yesterday by a reader about the relationship between nursing homes, rising registered nurse salaries and the new Virginia budget agreement.

Good questions. Virginia’s workforce includes nearly 70,000 registered nurses.

The state pays its workers, but it also pays its Medicaid share for private sector nurses. Pay for private sector workers is based upon market conditions. The market wage for registered nurses nationwide increased dramatically during COVID.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of that mess was that registered nurses, of whom Virginia has 11% fewer than demand calculated by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, got very large pay and bonus raises, and the new wage points appear to have stuck.

If the laws of economics work here, that will over time increase the number of nurses if we can educate and train them in the required numbers.

The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for all states show that the median wage for an RN in Virginia was $79,700 a year. In Northern Virginia portion of the D.C. metro area, the median was $92,800.  The underlying data are a couple of years old.

Wages and bonuses can vary a lot among Virginia hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, nursing school staff and government employees, and are higher or lower depending on specialty. The private sector offers $10,000 to  $20,000 signing bonuses paid out after the first year.

Employers of course must pay payroll taxes and other expenses related to employees, and thus their costs will generally exceed $100,000 per RN.

Virginia RNs are still underpaid compared to national figures. The mean annual wage for America’s 3 million registered nurses in May was $89,010 compared to Virginia’s $79,900.

The federal Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Services, aware of some of the questionable business models of bad actors in the nursing home industry, published last week a proposed rule to both increase the minimum number of RNs in nursing facilities and to require all nursing facilities to reveal every year how much of the Medicare and Medicaid payouts go to salaries and related expenses.

So, Medicare and Medicaid costs will go up yet again. Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Change Management, Federal, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Labor & workforce, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Medicaid, Regulation

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Predatory Virginia Nursing Home Owners

Posted on June 22, 2023 by | 22 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Merriam Webster:

Pred*a*tor: (noun) one who injures or exploits others for personal gain or profit.

The most medically vulnerable of us reside in skilled nursing facilities (SNF).

Nobody plans to be there, but that is where about thirty thousand Virginians find themselves at any one time. People who are moved from hospitals to save money for the insurers but are too sick or injured to go home yet.  

They are supposed to get the skilled nursing the name suggests. Many don’t.

Most are covered by Medicare. The rest by Medicaid or private insurance. It could be any one of us tomorrow.

These patients are at risk by design in some of these SNF’s. Put in danger by a perverted business model, a model that shows that returns can be juiced into double digits by stripping staff. The facilities can then be flipped in a couple of years at a profit based upon increased cash flows.

We will track their investments using government data. We will see a ritual, system-wide understaffing.  We will also see that the government accumulated and publishes staffing data but there is no evidence they use it for anything.

There are nursing homes in Virginia, for example, that provide less than 30% of the registered nurse hours per patient per day that CMS assesses they require.  Weekend statistics are worse. Nothing happens.

Today there are large systems not one of which is staffed to CMS norms.

There are real people who are harmed by those calculated violations.  Exceptionally vulnerable people are regularly denied at least their dignity, often their health and sometimes their lives.

The owners injure and exploit patients for personal gain or profit.

They are predators. Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Consumer protection, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Ethics, Federal, Government Oversight, Health Care, Insurance, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Medicaid, Scandals

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Virginia Nursing Home Regulations and Inspections – A Strategic Improvement Recommendation

Posted on June 13, 2023 by | 2 comments

By James C. Sherlock

Those who read this blog know that Virginia has far more than its share of bad nursing homes. They just do not know what can or should be done about it.

This third in a current series on Virginia nursing homes will take on a problem that is self-inflicted – the state’s nursing home regulatory structure.

Virginia’s nursing home regulations, upon which Virginia licensing inspections are based, are promulgated by the Board of Health.  They are at best redundant to federal requirements.

At worst they are different than federal standards, with no discernible gain in nursing home quality.  Operators follow the federal rules anyway, because they are almost inevitably stricter than those of the state.

Virginia can improve its nursing home regulations by conforming them precisely to federal regulations.  State law already requires them to be in “substantial conformity.”

This change, if accompanied by the combining of federal and state inspections which it would enable, would make everybody happy.  It would also go a long way towards fixing the staffing problems at Virginia’s inspection agency by reducing significantly their required efforts.

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in Federal, Government Oversight, Health Care, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Public safety & health

UVa’s Undergraduate Female/Male Demographics vs. Diversity, Equity and Federal Law

Posted on June 3, 2023 by | 55 comments

UVa President Jim Ryan

by James C. Sherlock

The University of Virginia measures its diversity efforts by statistics. We’ll hold them to their own standards.

That seems only equitable.

President Ryan has said that the demographic composition of students is easy to measure. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office, proving him right, proudly displays a Diversity Dashboard.

All eyes, including their own, go to race.

But we’ll look at sex. And we’ll remember the requirements of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments.

no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

It is demonstrable statistically that males are woefully underrepresented in the undergraduate population of the University of Virginia at rates inexplicable by chance.

We will examine as potential root causes the skewed demographics of:

  • the undergraduate student population on the one hand; and
  • the Undergraduate Admissions Office and Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights on the other.

And then we will see if we can identify any other potential causes of those discrepancies.

It won’t go well. Continue reading →

55 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, DEI, Demographics, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Federal, Scandals

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Virginia Democrats in the House of Representatives Vote Against Their Own Daughters

Posted on April 23, 2023 by | 50 comments

USA Women’s National Team 2019

by James C. Sherlock

Abigail Spanberger, (D) Va. – Voted against protections for girls and women in sports

Every Virginia Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a bill to amend Title IX to prohibit biological boys and men from competing against biological girls and women in K-12 and college sports.

Voting nay: Donald Beyer, Gerald Connolly, Jennifer McClellan, Bobby Scott, Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton.

H.R. 734 Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 amends Title IX (“on the basis of sex”) by stating that the term “sex” in athletics shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.

Jennifer McClellan (D) Va. – Voted against protections for girls and women in sports

The consequences of a no vote. H.R. 734 protects the dreams and hard work of girls who wish to play college sports.

The ones who got up early and stayed late training for their sport. The ones whose parents ferried them to practice and games on weekends.

It protects girls and young women in contact sports such as soccer and field hockey from inevitable injury from bigger, stronger, faster men.

Indeed, it protects their ability to participate.

It prevents the biological male who never won a medal from deciding — no hormones or surgery required — he is female to mount the platform and be awarded the gold. To break records set by girls and women.

To get rich with the new NIL rule in college sports and richer yet in women’s professional sports.

Everyone who thinks that won’t happen, raise your hand. Continue reading →

50 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Courts and law, Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Federal, Feminism and women's rights, Law enforcement, LGBQT, Parental Rights, Politics

It’s a Cemetery, for Crying Out Loud!

Posted on April 14, 2023 by | 22 comments

Arlington National Cemetery. photo by Rachel Larue.

by Donald Smith

Apparently, it is the will of the United States Congress that, in the interests of sensitivity and inclusiveness, we go into our cemeteries, and then search for and remove items that might offend someone who’s not related by blood or heritage to anyone buried there. The Congressional Naming Commission (CNC) has recommended that the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be removed, and the Secretary of Defense has concurred. The Congress, at least according to the CNC’s final report — which has mysteriously gone offline  — has given its blessing to the CNC’s recommendations.

The Confederate Memorial, sculpted by Moses Ezekiel, does not sit on the Washington Mall. It’s not on Capitol Hill, in the Rose Garden or Dupont Circle, or leering over Interstate 95. It’s in a cemetery. In order to see it, you have to go to non-public places — the cemetery itself, or a parking lot at Fort Myer, an Army base adjacent to Arlington’s western border.  

If you do go to Arlington to see the memorial … you really have to want to see it.   It’s on the other side of the cemetery from the welcome center and visitor’s parking. The shuttle tour through Arlington does not stop at the Confederate section, Section 16. Two friends have visited the memorial on four separate occasions over the past two years, and the shuttle drivers never mentioned the existence of the Confederate cemetery, much less how to find it. Don’t use the official Arlington Cemetery map as a guide: it doesn’t label the Confederate section. (Much like the Richmond city tourism maps that didn’t label the Lee, Jackson and Stuart statues on Monument Avenue).  

Once you get to the Confederate cemetery, you’ll see the memorial. It stands in the center of more than 400 Confederate graves, radiating out from the memorial in six concentric rings. If you look outside the Confederate section, you’ll notice some differences between the Confederate graves and the others in Arlington. The “regular government headstones” on most Arlington graves have curved tops, but the tops of Confederate gravestones are pointed. Graves in most of Arlington are arrayed in rows, but the Confederates are buried in a circle around the Ezekiel sculpture. This should allay the fears progressives and hypersensitive people might have that visitors might confuse Confederate graves with those of other Arlington dead. Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Federal, Virginia history

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Richmond FBI Office Used Undercover Agents to Spy on Traditional Catholics

Posted on April 13, 2023 by | 77 comments

by Robin Beres

The United States has not always been a bastion of religious freedom. When Virginia became an English colony in 1607, the English considered religious differences just as treasonous as political differences. Sure, Elizabeth I had reinstalled the Church of England following Queen Mary’s tumultuous reign, but the possibility of another Catholic on the throne remained a threat for decades.

As a result, English rulers decreed the Church of England to be the only official church in Virginia. For nearly two hundred years, there was no religious freedom in the colony. Even other Protestant denominations, such as Presbyterians and Baptists, were persecuted.

It wasn’t until 1786 that the Virginia General Assembly enacted Bill No. 82, “A Bill for establishing religious freedom.” Written by Thomas Jefferson and guided through the Virginia legislature by James Madison, the bill, eventually known as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, was strongly backed by leaders of other religious factions.

The bill stipulated that no government had the legitimate authority to establish or compel anyone to hold certain religious beliefs. Jefferson firmly believed that if this newly-born nation was to survive, all men must be given the freedom to determine their own beliefs.

The bill was the first attempt to get religion out of government and government out of religion. Eventually the act became the basis of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment declaration that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” The bill also confirmed Virginia as the birthplace of America’s religious freedom.

Little wonder then why many Virginians were stunned and concerned to learn of a January memo issued by an analyst with the Richmond FBI’s field office. The memo seemed to determine there were white supremacists masquerading as Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. The author of the “analysis” seems to have even created a name for this newly-discovered group: “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” or RTCs. Continue reading →

77 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, Federal, Freedom, General Assembly, Individual liberties, Law enforcement, Virginia history

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Virginia Very Low Income Housing Voucher Waiting Lists are Closed

Posted on April 4, 2023 by | 28 comments

SeaView Lofts apartments in Newport News

by James C. Sherlock

Some things don’t change that should.

Or don’t change fast enough to keep up with markets.

Which means they will fail.

From Virginia Housing’s discussion of the Housing Choice Voucher Program

The Housing Choice Voucher Program is the federal government’s major program for assisting very low-income families, low-income families, the elderly, and the disabled to decent, safe, and affordable housing in the private market.

Housing assistance is provided on behalf of the family or individual, and allows you to find housing (single-family homes, townhouses, mobile homes, and apartments) that that [sic] fits your needs.

Or not.  From the Housing Choice Voucher Waiting List Portal

We are sorry, but none of Virginia Housing waiting lists are currently open.

That is the list for the entire Commonwealth.

The program is broken. So, what is going on? Continue reading →

28 Comments

Posted in Efficiency in government, Federal, Housing

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Virginia Rail Safety Inspections

Posted on February 24, 2023 by | 16 comments

Courtesy Norfolk Southern

by James C. Sherlock

After the Ohio disaster, it is timely to review rail safety in Virginia.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation is the federal rail safety regulator in cooperation with state authorities.

FRA’s Office of Railroad Safety employs 400 railway inspectors. Federal safety management teams are organized by railroad or type of railroad.

The FRA summary of State rail safety participation states:

state programs emphasize planned, routine compliance inspections; however, States may undertake additional investigative and surveillance activities consistent with overall program needs and individual State capabilities.

FRA both conducts and pays for training of state inspectors.

Code of Federal Regulations 49 CFR Part 212 provides state rail safety participation regulations.

Railroad Regulation represents one of the original areas of responsibility assigned to the State Corporation Commission (SCC) when it was created by the Virginia Constitution of 1902.

Virginia statutory authority is found in Code of Virginia Title 56 Chapter 13.

Virginia today has two Class I (major) railroads (Norfolk Southern and CSXT), nine Class II (short line) railroads, and more than 6,700 miles of track. Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Efficiency in government, Federal, Government Oversight, Infrastructure, Public safety & health, Transportation

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Government Actors Try to Deflect, Deny and “Move On” from Failures During COVID

Posted on February 19, 2023 by | 37 comments

Courtesy CBS rendering of two CDC spring of 2021 survey findings about American high school girls reported Monday, Feb 13, 2022

by James C. Sherlock

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is in full self-defense mode.

CDC and the left backed, indeed insisted, upon social isolation during the pandemic.

Now they deflect and deny agency in the consequences. They continue to try to insulate themselves from the catastrophic educational and mental health effects on children and adolescents of that social isolation.

A weakened CDC Director is pledging to overhaul the agency and its culture, a backhanded admission of the unimaginably bad performance of CDC during COVID.

The entrenched bureaucracy that is that agency and its culture is admitting nothing. They are counting the days until she leaves.

So, if experience counts for anything, we pretty much know how the CDC “overhaul” will work out.

Virginia is due for the same sort of review of state actions during COVID.

The Northam administration stumbled badly at nearly every new turn after failing to either exercise or implement Virginia’s own pandemic emergency plan. Which was excellent and predicted nearly exactly the course of events.

Then they tried to cover up the existence of that plan itself.

I am not sure that such a review is forthcoming. If it is, it will be preemptively be declared political. It must be done anyway.

The federal government, under progressive management, is “moving on.”

Or trying to.

I hope Virginia government does not make the same mistake. Continue reading →

37 Comments

Posted in Change Management, Children and families, Culture wars, Disasters and disaster preparedness, Education (K-12), Ethics, Federal, Governance, Health Care, Mental illness and substance abuse, Planning, Politics

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Canceling Student Debt Accentuates the Class Divide

Posted on August 26, 2022 by | 27 comments

by Chris Saxman

The big news of the week was President Biden’s announcement that he was canceling a lot of student higher education debt. #IsItLegal?
Here are three non-judicial-branch reactions to the Biden plan:

The Washington Post Ed Board:

The loan-forgiveness decision is even worse. Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees. Though Mr. Biden’s plan includes an income cap, the threshold does not reflect need or earnings potential, meaning white-collar professionals with high future salaries stand to benefit….

Mr. Biden’s student loan decision will not do enough to help the most vulnerable Americans. It will, however, provide a windfall for those who don’t need it — with American taxpayers footing the bill.

President Obama’s Chairman of Council Economic Advisors: Continue reading →

27 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Federal

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Taking Food From Needy Children to Advance the Trans Agenda

Posted on August 26, 2022 by | 9 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

This ought to be the number one campaign issue in the U.S. right now: the Biden administration’s radical plan to starve the National School Lunch program unless states adopt far-left gender identity rules for schools that include allowing biological boys to compete in girls’ sports.

This outrageous federal blackmail leaves states struggling to choose between protecting girls and keeping needy children from going hungry.

And it’s just another case of a federal agency — this time the USDA — exceeding its authority. How many times will Biden’s out-of-control bureaucrats have to be smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court before they stop illegally exercising powers not delegated to them by Congress?

Twenty-two Republican attorneys general sued Tuesday to block the Agriculture Department’s newly announced guidance making student-lunch funds contingent on enforcing the Biden administration’s gender-identity agenda. Continue reading →

9 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Federal, LGBQT

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Youngkin on the Mar-a-Lago Raid

Posted on August 9, 2022 by | 183 comments

What do you think of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s comparison? Does former President Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, warrant special attention by federal law enforcement? Or have the DOJ and FBI become servants of the new ruling class, intent upon prosecuting only the transgressions of the political right? If the latter (remembering that this is a Virginia blog), how can Virginia, as a co-sovereign state in a federal system, push back?

183 Comments

Posted in Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Federal

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Social Theory vs. Science in K-12 Discipline in Virginia – Fraud or Just Wrong?

Posted on August 1, 2022 by | 72 comments

Both fraudulent and wrong?

by James C. Sherlock

American school children have in my lifetime been the subject of widespread experiments in theory disguised as breakthroughs in education.

Consider the “new math” and the “reading wars” as prominent examples.

Now we have social theory on school discipline created by federal civil rights lawyers piggybacking on what may or may not prove to be successful academic practices for children with disabilities. That social theory has been promulgated as state policy guidance in Virginia.

A Multi-tiered System of Supports (MTSS) has been used successfully in some instances to help teach academics to the learning-disabled.

This system was extended by lawyers from the aspirational left to school discipline and social-emotional learning without evidence. Now it has been published by the Virginia Board of Education for use by every school division in Virginia as a potential cure for “systemic racism” in discipline.

The 2021 Model Guidance for Positive, Preventative Code of Student Conduct Policy and Alternatives to Suspension (Virginia Model Guidance) may be fraudulently referenced. It is certainly incompletely referenced. Continue reading →

72 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Federal, Government Oversight, Politics

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The July Surprise from Congress – a Completely Revised Energy Economy by 2030

Posted on July 28, 2022 by | 88 comments

It’s simple. Let’s write a bill and put a date certain on it.  What could go wrong? Courtesy BP

by James C. Sherlock

Here at Bacon’s Rebellion we spend a lot of ink talking about Virginia energy demand and supply. We debate the ideas of both sides of the discussion. Turns out that we made the mistake of thinking these were state issues.

Democrats in Congress are about to intervene in every part of that discussion in a reconciliation bill to be passed with 50 votes in the Senate.

First, consider the inside joke of the title of an act to be buried in the reconciliation bill: “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

  • Congressional Democrats propose to fight inflation by pouring another $369 billion into the economy in a period of extremely high inflation and by raising taxes in a recession.
  • Projection of the writers of the bill: “slash” the country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030 — less than 8 years.
  • No risk is recognized in completely upending the nation’s energy economy — “slashing” it to use the term of art.
  • No controls offered to make sure that corruption doesn’t follow the money.
  • No controls offered to make sure the money accomplishes its goals.
  • No word on how the production of plastics, synthetic fabrics, fertilizer, concrete, asphalt, paraffin wax used by electric companies to insulate wires, steel, petrochemicals, and sulfur removed from petroleum used in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries might be impacted.
  • No tongues in cheeks when promising low-income Americans a $7,500 tax credit to buy a $65,000 electric vehicle.
  • No mention anywhere of how this bill merges seamlessly with the major climate “investments” in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
  • No word on how the new taxes, which will be popular with voters, will affect employment and capital investment. You know, capital investment, the money corporations use to bring innovation to market.  Or on the risk-reward calculations of investment decisions in early stage companies.
  • No indication of market effects when for-profit businesses pay the new taxes and their self-declared “not-for-profit” competitors in, say, the hospital industry do not.  No calculation of the effects on insurance rates.
  • Or, as Steve Haner points out, on the international competitiveness of American products with higher prices and less reliable energy.

The only thing that matters: Joe Manchin has agreed to it. Continue reading →

88 Comments

Posted in Energy, Federal

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