Workers Comp Fraud?

The New York Times ran an article a few weeks ago that a constituent sent me for comment. He wanted to know if the same fraud occurred in Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/business/some-physicians-making-millions-selling-drugs.html?smid=pl-share

In some states doctors providing care under workers compensation were running schemes that resulted in their making crazy money selling drugs directly to patients. You can read the article for details, but the question the article begs is “What about Washington?”

I rooted around a bit and found out that we stopped allowing this several years ago based on similar concerns. Running all the prescriptions through a single POS system allows us to track drug use, contraindications for multiple drugs, and to prevent fraud like what’s shown in this article.

I’m sure there are other ways inventive people come up with to scam the various state systems (Medicaid, Workers Comp, etc.), but we ride the data to try to prevent as much of it as we can.

 

Openings for Boats on the 520 Bridge

WSDOT has negotiated a better deal with the Coast Guard regarding bridge openings when boats with tall masts want pass. More hours in the exclusion zone and more notice. If you travel the bridge frequently you may want to sign up for WSDOTs text message alert service. When they know, you’ll know. This is a painful, but temporary experience until the construction is done, but it’ll be for more than one summer.

Here’s their press release on the ssue:

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Frustrating but Powerful

This week I attended a meeting hosted by the Mockingbird Society where foster youth and young alumni of “the system” present proposals they’ve worked on in small groups for a year on how to improve their experiences. This isn’t the first time I’ve attended this event, and it won’t be the last.

These young people make incredibly powerful presentations that get right at the heart of how to make our foster care system actually work for the kids instead of the adults. It’s frustrating because the solutions seem like they should already have been done, and some themes repeat year after year. Every year we take some of the ideas they present on and try to get them implemented.

I didn’t take notes on everything, but some of the ideas struck me as immediately implementable and almost criminal that they haven’t happened yet. We will follow up with the youth and the Mockingbird Society to make sure we are taking care of what needs to happen.

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Fiscal Cliff and the Washington Budget

Richard Davis of the Washington Research Council posted today about the risks facing the Washington State budget. I don’t always agree with Dick, but he usually has something to say worth listening to. I do agree with him this time, that the largest risk we currently face is that Congress will fail to come to an agreement on how to handle the budget before automatic sequesters kick in.

We would see tax increases and spending cuts at a time when most responsible economists think that they would do significant damage to the economy. He says:

Domestic politics, though, are the greater threat. At the end of the year, absent presidential leadership and congressional action, the nation heads off the fiscal cliff. That’s when the Bush-era tax cuts expire and the automatic spending cuts adopted in the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations kick in.

Higher taxes and reduced spending will strangle an already gasping recovery. The Congressional Budget Office says that unless Congress relaxes fiscal restraints, the economy will go into recession in the first two quarters of 2013.

It’s worth reading the whole post. The comments I posted on his blog:

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Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Fundraising

Bald Headshot of Ross (during chemotherapy)Fortunately you all haven’t seen me looking like this in a long time. in 2005 I was diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma. I went through a fair amount of chemotherapy and then a stem-cell transplant in 2007. It’s been five years and all good so far. Thank you Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center and everyone else involved in the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

I’m doing some fundraising for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as payback and I’d love your help. Click here to contribute.

I’m going to ride my bicycle 120 miles, in Las Vegas, in September as part of the LLS’s “Team in Training.” I’m doing a lot of training rides to get in shape so it is not insanely painful, but it’ll still be a serious piece of work.

The LLS raises money for both research and support for families who are going through treatment. I was fortunate enough to live within 10 miles of the epicenter of research on my particular cancer. Many others are not and have to spend 3-4 months, or longer, living away from their family in Seattle to get treatment. As you can imagine, this is hard to manage for many people.

Your contribution will mean a lot. You can click here to go to the online contribution page.

Long-term pension costs in Washington

The New York Times had an article this week about pension costs faced by states and large cities across America. Their argument is that the rate of return assumed by the plans is too high because returns for most funds over the last decade have been lower than the estimate. They say that 8% is the rate most states use, and it’s what Washington has been using for the past few years.

Washington is in the enviable position of having a mostly fully-funded pension system. We are one of the best-funded systems in the country. The Pew Center on the States does a comprehensive review periodically and serves as a clear basis for comparison between states. They ding Washington for not funding health care benefits for retires, which we largely do not offer, so its no surprise that we haven’t funded it. Many of the local governments in Washington do have significant liability here, and have done a haphazard job of putting aside money to pay for these.

Chart from Pew report on WashingtonI think it’s interesting that the Pew folks ding us for having the system 100% funded. At the beginning of the decade we were 120% funded, and we’ve allowed this to decline to the current levels, but if you look at the chart you can see that once we brought the funding level down to 100% we kept it there. Overfunding pension accounts isn’t necessary and consumes resources that could be spent on something more important.

The Times article seems to want states to lower their expected return. We are doing this in incremental steps every biennium with a target of 7.5%. I’m a little concerned about using the 10-year returns as the baseline – the last decade included two significant recessions, one of which was (and still is) the worst recession since the great depression. Our 40-year return is above 8%. This may or may not be a better basis for comparison. We will watch the returns and adjust as we go.

Pensions are something that require a long time horizon to think about. Making abrupt changes based on short-term data is dangerous, but so is not making decisions that adjust the funding levels if there really are fundamental changes in the economy.

 

New (Preliminary) Economic Forecast for Washington

The Economic and Revenue Forecast Council has updated its forecast, as we do every quarter. This is the preliminary forecast. The final will be done in a couple of weeks when we get updated numbers from Global Insight, our vendor for national data. We modify that with specific data from Washington, and change a couple of parameters in the model to make it work better for our purposes. These are described in the text of the report. It’s worth reading the summary for some insight into where our economy is going.

In short, we’re pretty much on track for a normal forecast. Of course, I am not an economist (I do get to play one on TV) so I can’t predict exactly what this will mean for our revenue forecast, but I don’t expect too much change as a result.

http://www.erfc.wa.gov/forecast/documents/p0512.pdf

 

Update on Floating Signs in Lake Washington

Seattle is saying no, he cannot float the sign. WSDOT has many more words to the same effect that I’ve included below. We are working with all the mayors surrounding the lake to make sure that this visual blight does not actually occur.

I will continue to post on this issue, and propose legislation in January should it be needed.

WSDOT Comments:

Continue reading “Update on Floating Signs in Lake Washington”

Eastside Schools Rock

5 of the top 5 high schools in Washington State and 5 of the top 200 high schools in the nation are in either the Bellevue or Lake Washington School District, acording to the annual US News and World Report 2012 ranking. While not an uncontroversial ranking (it doesn’t include Bellevue’s football prowess, for example) it’s a well thought-through system of measuring how well high schools prepare students for success in college, AND how well they work with traditionally underserved populations.

Trying to figure out how to have this kind of performance in all our schools in Washington is more difficult. A school and a district’s reputation drive population movement. Many people have moved to Bellevue and Lake Washington because of the schools. These tend to be people who value education, and consequently their students tend to do better in school. This drives the performance of the district, further improving in-migration of education-lovers. Interestingly, this also drives up home values.

More on Toxic Flame Retardants

Government scientists found that chairs containing flame retardants, like the one being tested above, burn just as fast as identical chairs without them. (Consumer Products Safety Commission / May 5, 2012)

In 2005, 2006, and 2007 I championed a bill in the Legislature that prohibited the use of poly-brominated diethyl (PBDE) flame retardants in products sold in Washington State. I argued that PBDEs were toxic for children and unnecessary. It was an ugly fight with the chemical industry. I was surprised at the level of duplicity in the testimony presented. At that time I had not seen the level of hardball that people were willing to play when their financial interests were at stake.

I eventually succeeded in banning PBDEs in most furniture and children’s products, though the industry is working to slightly tweak the chemical composition of their product to get around the ban. The Chicago Tribune has done some serious reporting on the issue and is coming out with a big series of articles that expose an even deeper level of duplicity than I had believed possible, even after seeing the testimony here in Washington.

The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries — Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers — waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.

Chicago Tribune