Floyd County High School’s Buffaloes opened the varsity football home season Friday night with a 47-0 stomping of Rural Retreat.

Roanoke and parts of Southwestern Virginia are pretty much a one-stop market when it comes to health care. Most of the hospitals are owned by the so-called "not-for-profit" Carilion Health System, a mega-health care giant that is driving up health care and insurance costs through lavish perks for executives and excessive charges for medical procedures.

Reports The Wall Street Journal:

In 1989, the U.S. Department of Justice tried but failed to prevent a merger between nonprofit Carilion Health System and this former railroad town’s other hospital. The merger, it warned in an unsuccessful antitrust lawsuit, would create a monopoly over medical care in the area.

Nearly two decades later, the cost of health care in the Roanoke Valley — a region in southwestern Virginia with a population of 300,000 — is soaring. Health-insurance rates in Roanoke have gone from being the lowest in the state to the highest.

That’s partly a reflection of Carilion’s prices. Carilion charges $4,727 for a colonoscopy, four to 10 times what a local endoscopy center charges for the procedure. Carilion bills $1,606 for a neck CT scan, compared with the $675 charged by a local imaging center.

Carilion’s market clout is manifest in other ways. With eight hospitals, 11,000 employees and $1 billion in assets, the tax-exempt hospital system has become one of the dominant players in the Roanoke Valley’s economy. Its dozens of subsidiaries include businesses ranging from athletic clubs to a venture-capital fund.

The power of nonprofit hospital systems like Carilion over their regional communities has increased in recent years as their incomes have surged. Critics charge this is creating untaxed local health-care monopolies that drive the costs of care higher for patients and businesses.

"It’s a one-market town here in terms of health care," says Sam Lionberger, who owns a local construction firm. "Carilion has the leverage."

Anyone who has encountered this health care monolith knows it is expensive and often unresponsive. It’s also sad that not one of the area’s many media outlets have uncovered the effect Carilion has had on heatlh care costs. It took the Wall Street Journal to uncover the story and the only thing the Roanoke media has done is allow Carilion to spew out propaganda claiming the story is wrong.

A cowardly cretin (or cretins) vandalized Floyd’s new public restroom this week, removing a urinal from the wall and allowing hundreds of gallons of water to spill out onto the floor and flow out of the building.

It was the kind of despicable act that makes your blood boil. Whether it was the act of someone with a philosophical difference with the changes that are coming to our town or just a mindless vandal who inflicts damage for the hell of it is less important than the viciousness of the act itself — a wanton destruction of public property that brings disgrace upon our town and raises questions about the character of our community.

A sad day for Floyd.

Rain soaked the area Tuesday and intensified overnight with Wednesday dawning with severe weather and flood alerts. The deluge will probably leave Grand Canyon size gullies in our driveway but I don’t care. We need the water in what has been a second year of dry conditions.

Forecasts claim the upcoming Labor Day Weekend will be mostly sunny and pleasant but, with the dryness around here, I’d trade a long weekend of rain for beautiful weather.

Had some time to kill between appointments in Roanoke Monday, so I visited the Virginia Museum of Transportation down by the rail tracks.

My mother and I arrived in Roanoke in 1952 aboard a Norfolk and Western trail pulled by one of the legendary 611 streamlined locomotives (right) after a long train ride and several connections from Tampa, Florida. I remember that steam locomotive well, a belching monsters that both terrified and excited a five-year-old.

Also on display is the huge 1218 locomotive (above), a favorite of railroad photographer O. Winston Link. A visit to the Link museum in the old N&W passenger station is also worth the time.

A gallery dedicated to cars and road travel (below) wasn’t open on my last visit a few years ago but I got a chance to tour it this time around.  In it, you will find vintage cars, billboards even a series of Burma Shave signs.

The Transportation Museum has struggled financially and depends on donations and community support to stay afloat. If you’re in Roanoke, take time to visit. It’s worth the effort.