Also on today’s menu:
Explaining ‘Build Back Better’
A Chesapeake National Recreation Area?
Apart from allowing unvaccinated nurses to care for and potentially infect nursing home patients with the coronavirus, Governor Chris Sununu’s response to the pandemic has been balanced, and on the whole, reasonable. His latest initiatives are insightful, such as creating “Strike Teams” to provide long-term care staffing that will increase capacity at long-term care facilities that have unstaffed empty beds.
In a letter to members of the Fiscal Committee of the General Court on November 30, Sununu wrote that the ability to transfer hospital patients awaiting beds at long-term care facilities as soon as openings occur is important, and, in order to do that, the Department of Health and Human Services would like the authority to spend unencumbered money to allow providers to accept patients immediately, “providing a bed with relevant services, and then, after accepting the individual, the provider may seek payment at a set rate. In many cases,” he wrote, “that flexibility will allow DHHS to move an individual within hours of a bed becoming available. … DHHS would otherwise have to enter into individual contracts with potentially hundreds of providers. Even if contracting with individual providers for a small number of beds was administratively feasible; that approach would require weeks of processing time as opposed to hours for the Department and providers to act.”
He noted that DHHS also submitted requests to use FEMA funding to increase access to vaccination and testing sites. “The benefits of these requests are two-fold. First, these services are a direct benefit to all individuals, employers, and schools across the State. Second, increasing access to these services outside of hospitals will result in a decreased need for personnel in hospitals providing those services, allowing them to be reassigned to other areas of acute care.”
Explaining ‘Build Back Better’
The bipartisan infrastructure bill that has become law was dubbed “Build Back Better” — seemingly another inane title for a government program. However, at a stop in Minnesota, President Joe Biden explained “what I mean when I say, ‘Build back better.’”
“[W]e know that we can’t just build back to what it was before, and that used to be the rule,” he said. “If anything got wiped out by a weather event, you were able to build back that road at exactly the specifications it was before. But you can’t now because the climate is not going to get better. … [Y]ou’re going to have to build that road a couple of feet higher. You can’t build it back to what it was. You can’t replace those high-powerlines that come down with the same kind of construction. They have to be built so they’re more resilient.”
Among its other benefits, “the law is going to make high-speed Internet affordable and available everywhere in America, and create jobs laying down the broadband lines,” Biden said.
Interestingly, Representative Rob Wittman (R-Virginia), who voted against the infrastructure bill, has a new ad boasting, “Congressman Rob Wittman is Bringing Broadband to the Northern Neck.”
“It’s the future,” the ad states, saying Wittman “has helped bring broadband to thousands of homes and businesses. And he will not stop until every Virginian is given an equal opportunity to connect to the future.”
A Chesapeake National Recreation Area?
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan called the Chesapeake Bay “a national treasure,” and now a group of lawmakers, environmentalists, and watermen are working on legislation to make coastal sites along the estuary parts of a national recreation area managed by the National Park Service.
The group envisions the Chesapeake National Recreation Area to be similar in design to California’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It would have national park facilities in Annapolis, Maryland, and Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, anchoring a series of additional park sites in both states.
The nation’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake is 200 miles long, stretching from its headwaters in the Susquehanna River north of Baltimore, Maryland, through the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., to Virginia, between Cape Charles and Cape Henry.
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