Another potential conflict of interest that Lanier Cansler will have to negotiate as Secretary of DHHS is his association with the nursing home industry. His firm Cansler Fuquay Solutions represented the North Carolina Health Care Facilities Association (NCHCFA) until December 23, 2008 when his partner Gary Fuquay resigned as a lobbyist for the trade organization.

Medicaid billing is a huge factor in nursing home operations as Medicaid represents up to 75% of revenues. Nursing home reimbursements are a small but significant of all Medicaid spending in the State which now will be managed by another company which was represented until recently by Lanier Cansler.

Cansler is one of just two people still listed on the NCHCFA website as directors of the organization’s subsidiary FutureCare NC. The other director is J Craig Souza, Executive Director of NCHCFA. Directorship of a non-profit might seem unremarkable except that Souza earns annual compensation in excess of $500,000 to represent an industry that gets much of its revenue through State government from the Federal government.

Souza may be the most influential person in NC you have never heard of. He got his start in the 1970′s in the Holshouser administration working under Dave Flaherty, head of the DHHS precursor known as the Department of Human Resources. Flaherty went on to run unsuccessfully for Governor against Jim Hunt. Souza’s career since has involved representing and lobbying of health care industry interests.

Souza is an Eastern North Carolinian who became an ECU Trustee and has been a member of the UNC Board of Governors for several years. He is credited with bringing a School of Nursing to ECU. The new School of Dentistry at ECU is a client of Cansler Fuquay Solutions which has been researching potential locations for community dental clinics in Eastern NC.

Souza is not known to make political contributions but is associated with lobbying and politics. He is the owner of Vinnie’s Steakhouse & Tavern in Raleigh, scene of Jim Black’s “last supper”, a private dinner attended by 20 Democratic House members and several lobbyists where Black announced his decision not to run for Speaker. The restaurant has private rooms named “The Caucus Room”, The Chamber” and “The Gallery” and was popular with lobbyists at least until spending restrictions triggered in part by Black’s excesses.

Cansler may well be qualified to run DHHS but he’ll have to work extra hard to avoid conflicts of interest with the private sector he’ll be charged with overseeing.

Ten Questions to Better Pilot Programs is an obscure but interesting Fiscal Brief produced last month by the Fiscal Research Division of the North Carolina General Assembly.  Study bills and pilot programs are often used to molify sponsors of legislation otherwise faced with certain defeat.  When properly designed and implemented pilot programs can produce useful information.  Many such programs are inadvertently doomed to preclude meaningful assessment, producing ambiguous results.

The Fiscal Brief has some general recommendations:

Policymakers should insist upon pilot programs that are designed as randomly controlled trials whenever possible.
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Policymakers should avoid insisting that their district or districts be included in treatment groups.
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A pilot program that generates actionable data is far more important than having a poorly designed program placed in a home district.
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Policymakers should allow time for pilot programs to reach their full implementation and allow time to observe program effects. Acting too early might result in the abandonment of programs that are actually working.

Read More…

The Center for Economic Policy and Research has released an analysis of media coverage showing how the media, and television news in particular, has perpetuated the myth that offshore drilling would substantially lower gas prices by ignoring the government's own reporting that the benefits from such drilling would be too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.

The paper, Oil Drilling In Environmentally Sensitive Areas: The Role of the Media , finds that in 267 television news broadcasts, the Energy Information Agency data was cited only once. Also, in 91 percent of the news programs in this sample, there was not even an opposing opinion presented.

The US Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency in a report called Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf states that if access was granted to all Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) resources there would not be any significant increase in production before 2030 at which point production would peak at only an additional 200,000 barrels per day. Read More…