Drug firms told to reveal W.Va. shipment records

A Boone County judge has ordered four pharmaceutical drug distributors to reveal their shipments to West Virginia pharmacies over the past five years.…

A Boone County judge has ordered four pharmaceutical drug distributors to reveal their shipments to West Virginia pharmacies over the past five years.
 
Circuit Judge William Thompson acted Thursday in a lawsuit filed last year by former state Attorney General Darrell McGraw. The suit accused the companies of helping to contribute to the state’s pain pill abuse epidemic.
 
The Charleston Gazette  reports Cardinal Health, Anda Inc., AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp. and J.M Smith Corp. must disclose within 30 days every state pharmacy where they’ve delivered drugs.
 
West Virginia leads the nation in the rate of fatal drug overdoses. A report released this month by the Trust for America’s Health says that rate is now six times higher than it was about a decade ago.
 

Manchin proposes delay to ACA individual mandate

Senator Joe Manchin is proposing a delay in a key component to the federal Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate. Manchin defended his legislation…

Senator Joe Manchin is proposing a delay in a key component to the federal Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate. Manchin defended his legislation saying it allows the administration more time to fix glitches in the enrollment system, but a left-leaning policy group in Charleston maintains a delay will have significant negative impacts on West Virginians.

The individual mandate requires all Americans sign up for health insurance through the federal health care exchange by April 1, or face a penalty of $95 or 1 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater.

The penalty will be collected by the IRS and increases to more than $300 after the first year.

Manchin, however, said it’s too soon to punish Americans who are unable to sign up for health care because of problems with the federal enrollment website. He’s proposing that date be pushed back from April 1 to January 1, 2015.

“This should be a transition year,” he said in a conference call Thursday. “We’re seeing all the problems that they’re having rolling this thing out. It’s going to have some problems and they’re going to have to work through that, but people shouldn’t be facing a fine because they can’t log in.”

But Brandon Merritt, health policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, said the individual mandate is key and without it the Affordable Care Act will fall apart.

“The idea of the Affordable Care Act is to provide insurance to those who don’t have insurance and to help control the costs of insurance that has been creeping up for decades now,” Merritt said. “So, the individual mandate is what holds this together.”

Without that mandate, Merritt said healthy individuals won’t purchase plans, preventing more individuals from buying coverage and leaving insurance companies with a pool of sickly customers.

“Essentially what happens is that those who don’t seek as much treatment in any given year are helping cover the costs of those who do seek more treatment, and so under the Affordable Care Act, if the individual mandate is delayed likely what would happen is that only those who are sicker and going to require more care throughout the year are going to be the ones who purchase more health insurance,” Merritt said. “What that does is skews the risk pool so the health insurers essentially get set up with a sicker population that requires more treatment and is going to cost them more money.”

The more providers have to pay to cover their customers, the higher premium rates will climb thus preventing even more individuals from being able to access health care.

Manchin said that notion in Washington is being pushed by the insurance companies.

“I think everybody wants insurance if it’s affordable,” he said. “It’s part of who we are as Americans, but on the other hand, you have to have a marketable product. That’s where the insurance industry has to work with the administration and it has to be market forces that are driving it.”

Republicans have proposed similar delays in the hopes of preventing the ACA from taking root at all.

Manchin said his intention is not to get rid of the ACA in its entirety, but to put more pressure on the Obama administration and the industry to offer an affordable, quality product to consumers and to prevent Americans from being penalized before it is available.

“A lot of my colleagues keep saying delay, delay, delay. They want to delay it and never start it,” Manchin said. “Well, this is such a mammoth undertaking that you have to start down the road of (trying to work) within the marketplace, figure out where the problems are and if they can be fixed or not.”

Merritt doesn’t believe Manchin is trying to sabotage the bill’s implementation, but still, his analysis is blunt, saying straight out the senator’s plan won’t work. Merritt said now is not the time to tread lightly on a subject that affects thousands of West Virginians.

“While I understand Senator Manchin’s approach to say let’s try to find a common ground, I don’t think this is the compromise we really want to see because this is going to have negative impacts not just politically, but here in West Virginia with those who are unable to get insurance and those who do get insurance on the private market will see increased premiums,” he said.

“So, it’s really going to hit us here at home if we delay this aspect of the Affordable Care Act. I think it’s really important that we put it bluntly to say that this is a bad idea.”

When asked if the bill would receive a signature if it made it to the President’s desk, Manchin said he was unsure, but he hopes the bipartisan support will force the President to consider it.
 

W.Va. Public Service Commission hears electric bill concerns

The West Virginia Public Service Commission got an earful from Eastern Panhandle electric customers unhappy with Potomac Edison’s billing practices during a public hearing Wednesday evening and Thursday morning in Shepherdstown, W.Va.

Customers are upset because last winter and spring they received estimated monthly bills that were much higher than normal. In some cases the electric company did estimated readings several months in a row. Delegate Stephen Skinner (D-Jefferson) was among those who spoke during the hearing.

“You can’t expect people to be hit with the kind of bills that they’ve been hit with here and not have problems,” Skinner said. “The folks on fixed incomes, some of whom are here today, can’t deal with these business practices.”

Potomac Edison and Mon Power are supposed to read meters every other month, and can send estimated bills in months when actual readings aren’t taken.

Before the PSC heard comments, Potomac Edison representatives gave a power point explanation for the problem, saying two big storms last year, the derecho and October snowstorm affected the ability to actually read the meters.

Skinner was among those who didn’t buy that explanation.

“What I heard this morning about the reasons for why we’re in the situation that we’re in was excuse, excuse, excuse, excuse,” he said. “And then I heard that there were some issues in need of enhancement. I have yet to hear the real personal responsibility from First Energy and Potomac Edison for the problems in the Eastern Panhandle.”

Several customers who received extraordinarily high bills testified. One was Kevin Bohrer, who is retired from a power company where he worked at a generation plant. Bohrer says the inconsistent billing has been hard on him.

“This is the way I’ve been paying my electric bill now for the last two-to three years: I have to send them an extra $100 or $200 extra every month because I don’t want to get hit with no $500, $600 electric bill like I did one time,” Bohrer said. “I can’t afford that I’m on disability now.”

Some customers described getting multiple bills in a single month, and others expressed concern that the power company doesn’t have good enough documentation to accurately estimate a meter reading. Sharon Wilson offered a solution.

“I think the only way to get a bottom line accurate estimate for everybody is to mandate that for a 12 month consecutive period that the meters get read every month,” Wilson said. “And that to me would give a base line then and would probably make future bills be more accurate.”

Potomac Edison spokesman Todd Myers said the company encourages customers to call when they have a problem so the Potomac Edison can work with them. Several company representatives were on hand to meet with customers during and after the hearing.

Myers said before First Energy bought Allegheny Power, the employees who read meters had other duties, like collections, hook ups and disconnections.

“Now meter readers do nothing but read meters,” he said. “The other responsibilities have been split off.”

“So people say there’s not as many meter readers,” he said. “There may be a little bit less meter readers but they are meter readers who are 100 percent dedicated to reading meters all day long. And we’ve clustered their routes together.”

Potomac Edison representatives were on hand at the hearing to help people find a solution to their individual billing problem. The PSC also took comments from Mon Power customers Thursday night and Friday morning in Fairmont, W.Va.

Early Education priority for lawmakers

Only days into the 2013 Legislative session, it became obvious to those eyeing the halls of the state Capitol it would be the year of Education Reform. With the passage of the governor’s bill, immediate steps were taken to improve student achievement, but some steps couldn’t be implemented so quickly. Legislators are still learning how they can help improve early childhood education in West Virginia.

The most critical years in learning come from birth to the third grade. That’s what members of the National Governor’s Association’s Division of Education told state lawmakers this week.

They presented trends and data showing just how crucial these years can be and suggested they become the priority for West Virginia’s education system moving forward.

Albert Wat is a senior policy analyst for the division.

“All of this is to say that the first 8 years, based on these data and trends and based on what we know about brain development, is extremely important in terms of setting a foundation, either weak or strong, in terms of success,” he told lawmakers Wednesday.

Wat presented data on early education from across the country to the Joint Committee on Education, starting with graduation rates. Nationwide, Wat said 22 percent of low-income students fail to graduate by the age of 19.

“The good news is that if kids of any income levels are proficient at reading by third grade, so for low income kids if they’re proficient in reading by third grade,” he said, “their rates of not graduating by the age of 19, so the failure rate if you want to call it that, basically is reduced by half.”

Wat’s data shows the rate drops to 11 percent for low income kids, and from 6 percent to just 2 percent for children from higher income families.

The data supports the importance of meeting that benchmark, unfortunately, Wat said it’s not being met across the country. At least not yet.

“The bad news is that even though that’s such an important benchmark, in our nation two-thirds of our fourth graders are not performing at a proficient level in terms of reading,” he said.

That very benchmark, for a child to be proficient in reading by the third grade, was set forth as a goal for the state by Governor Tomblin earlier this year when he signed the education reform bill.  

Even though there is a strong focus on reading, Wat said STEM—science, technology, engineering and math education—are still priorities.

“There’s a little bit of a lag in terms of policy, but there’s a lot of research about how much kids can learn in the early years, before third grade even before kindergarten, in terms of math that we’re not taking advantage of,” Wat said.

“The way that we’re training teachers and the curriculum we’re using is really dumbing down the content that kinds can learn.”

It extends beyond the reading, writing, and math that are traditionally taught in school. Wat said today, effective teachers are learning to teach kids at these young ages more cognitive, critical thinking and even emotional lessons to educate the whole child.

So how do we provide children a strong education base at a younger age? Wat said it starts with the teachers.

“I think that the notion is that these grades are easy to teach. If you know how to add one plus one, then you should be able to teach math in the first grade which is not true,” he said. “So, I think we need to really need to pay more attention to the quality of instruction in these grades.”

The way to do that, Wat said, is with a proper teacher evaluation system, one that is adapted to focus on the needs of early education, and continuous professional development that allows teachers to learn nationwide best practices for young students and put them to use.

But it’s not just teachers. Sarah Silverman, program director of the NGA’s Education Division, said principals play a crucial role as well.

She suggested those overseeing pre-K through third grades should have clinical experience with early grade levels and should be evaluated on how well they are able to assist their teachers in continuing focus on those critical ages.
 

How much do we know about drilling horizontal wells?

The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 required studies be conducted to gain a more profound understanding of all that's entailed in the natural gas…

The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 required studies be conducted to gain a more profound understanding of all that’s entailed in the natural gas drilling that’s sweeping northern West Virginia. Those reports are coming due, and legislators are hearing from scientists who have been looking into the matter.

Two major reports are being discussed in Charleston this week. One looks at air and noise pollution, while another considers water use related to Horizontal Well drilling.

1. Air and Noise

Michael McCawley is the interim chairman of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health from the School of Public Health at West Virginia University. He presented recommendations based on the air, noise, and light study he published this summer.

McCawley says the major surprise his study revealed were copious amounts of benzene detected by his air monitors. The monitors were set up at the current legal “set-back distance” of 625 feet from the center of drilling pads. His report notes that at one site, benzene levels were detected of up to 85 parts per billion. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends workers regularly exposed to 100 parts per billion wear respiratory protection.

So why worry about benzene? Substantial quantities of epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory data link benzene to aplastic anemia, acute leukemia, and bone marrow abnormalities.

“Now we suspect that the benzene may be coming, in fact, from the diesel engines because a lot of the fracking sites have a lot of truck traffic going in and out of them. And also during the actually fracking itself there are a number of diesel engines that are sitting in the pad being run at high rates,” McCawley says.

Based on his findings, McCawley made suggestions to lawmakers this week.

Control the emissions.

McCawley says the current required “set-back distance” is a regulation that should be abandoned. The aim of the rule was to protect people in the vicinity from exposure, but he says an arbitrary number won’t achieve that given the variability of topography and considering that pollution doesn’t always come from the center of the pad. 

To protect not only people within the vicinity but also workers on site from harmful emissions, McCawley submits that monitoring real-time emissions is likely the smartest, most effective tool to employ. Especially around sensitive areas like houses, hospitals, schools, monitoring would allow high levels of pollutants to be addressed immediately by the people controlling the operation.

Control the noise.

“We were seeing short term exposures exceeding 100 decibels around some of these sites. 100 decibels is kind of the level of a rock band. You don’t want a rock band outside your bedroom window. Although the long term exposures were below 70 db on average for the sampling period that we saw, there were levels that exceeded 70 db for brief periods of time. But those brief periods of time can be a concern particularly if they’re disturbing sleep or if they’re really loud.”

An expert in public health, McCawley explains that 55 decibels is enough to interrupt sleep which, in turn, could result in hypertension, or high blood pressure—already endemic in the state, especially in the northern panhandle.

He says noise pollution needs to be taken into account when constructing these sites, and also when considering the traffic patterns to and from them.

2. Water use

Water use is another area of concerns for legislators. Evan Hansen, president of Downstream Strategies, conducted a study on water use in hydraulic fracturing operations in and around the state. He and his colleagues set out to analyze water-use data provided by natural gas drillers to the Department of Environmental Protection—data operators are required to provide as per the 2011 law.

Hansen says, the average Marcellus well in WV injects about 5 million gallons of water into wells as fracking fluid. 8 percent of that comes back up. He says the DEP and industry should be applauded for adopting new recycling practices as about 75% of that flowback is now being reused. He says the remainder is disposed of in deep well injections.

“Even though about 3/4 of the flowback water is being reused and recycled, which is great, that’s only substituting for 10 percent of the water withdrawls. So while great progress has been made in the areas of recycling, that’s not taking care of the vast quantities of water that still need to be withdrawn from WV streams.”

Hansen adds that tracking this waste water should continue to be a priority. WV already sees 100-million gallons of waste water each year and in PA, across the border where the industry is significantly more developed, they see nearly a billion gallons of waste. Each year.

Hansen also sees several areas of improvement, regarding data collection and reporting requirements. 

  • Fix mistakes identified in the database, and make data entry less error-prone to prevent future mistakes
  • Ensure data gets reported completely and within appropriate timeframes
  • Make data available and searchable online so that researchers and public have access
  • Streamline the efforts of DEP offices of Oil and Gas and Water Management regarding wastewater

Hansen says his biggest concern is that WV law only requires operators to report flowback water. It’s a different story in PA where flowback water only accounts for 38% of reported waste.

“In WV, because only flowback fluid is reported, and the other types of waste are not reported, we still don’t really have a handle on how much waste is being generated and where it’s going. So we’re still operating with some uncertainty about what’s going on in the real world and that’s not a great place to be if you’re trying to get the right policies in place to protect water resources,” Hansen says.

Hansen says his report will be made available on the 30th of October. That day he will also conduct an online webinar explaining his finding that is open to the public.

 

Developer of troubled ACA website has W.Va. computer contract

A company involved in the problematic federal health care exchange website has a contract to design a system to manage West Virginia state government…

A company involved in the problematic federal health care exchange website has a contract to design a system to manage West Virginia state government accounts.
 
     CGI Group subsidiary CGI Federal is the developer of the complex U.S. government website that’s been hit by technical problems, resulting in long waits for Americans to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
 
     CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. The Charleston Gazette reports CGI Group’s Public Sector group is handling an overhaul of the state government’s software system.
 
     The state awarded a contract to CGI Group in 2011 to integrate state agencies’ budgeting, financial management and human resources operations. The new system, called OASIS, is expected to be in operation by 2015.

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