Opening with a bang
Floyd County High School’s Buffaloes opened the varsity football home season Friday night with a 47-0 stomping of Rural Retreat.
Health care monopoly and rip-off
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.
Cowardly cretins
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.
Don’t stop the rain
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.
Traveling through history
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.
Return of the touristas
Rode the Blue Ridge Parkway Sunday and found heavy traffic as falling gas prices appeared to put both cars and larger vehicles back on the twisting mountain road that winds through Virginia and North Carolina.
Maybe this bodes well for the upcoming Labor Day weekend where events like the annual Carroll County Gun Show and Flea Market depend heavily on carloads of visitors. The visitors packed the streets of Floyd Friday night.
We can hope.
Sports season
School started in Floyd County Thursday and the sports season kicked off Thursday night with volleyball at FCHS. The first home football game is Friday, August 28. Get out your Buffalo hats, shirts and banners and suport your local school athletics.
Return to Grandin Road
Grandin Road was my first neighborhood when I moved to Roanoke in 1965. Had a one-bedroom furnished flat at Grandin Road Apartments, attended the University of Virginia’s Roanoke Campus just up the street during the day and worked nights at The Roanoke Times, starting as a copy boy and moving up to reporter the following year.
Garland’s drug store anchored one side of the street and the Grandin Theater the other. A large hardware store served residents along with a cleaners and a TV/appliance store. We bought groceries at Mick or Mack and got our cars washed at the Grandin Car Wash.
I hadn’t been back on Grandin since returning to the area in 2004 so I parked along the street on Wednesday night and took a walk. The Mick or Mack and Grandin Theater remain today but the street is now dominated by restaurants, coffee stops, a whole food store and some trendy boutiques. Took in Gonzo, the documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, at the Grandin. The theater is now subdivided into several screens but is still cozy The popcorn was better in the 60s.
UVa’s Roanoke campus closed in 1966 and many of the faculty moved over to the new Virginia Western Community College on Colonial Avenue. I moved to The Jefferson Apartments next to Elmwood Park near downtown. The Victorian apartment building was torn down a few years after I left The Roanoke Times and moved on to a newspaper in Illinois. A sign for Carrillion Hospital now sits on the site.
Jefferson Street never felt like a real neighboord. Grandin Road did. It was nice to visit the old neghborhood.
Easy Rider
Floyd graphics designer Elaine Martinez snapped this shot the other day as I prepared to head home after a long day. The ’08 Harley 1200 Low Sportster is my primary form of transportation these days. At 50 miles per gallon on the open road, it is a lot more economical. And a lot more fun.
As previously reported, Amy’s request for a bike for her birthday rekindled my love affair with motorcycles. I’ve put several hundred miles on the bike since buying it in June and ride every day I can. A recent crisis within our family has sapped a lot of mine and Amy’s time and any time I can steal away to ride provides a much-needed sense of calm. On this day, I opted not to take the most direct route home (straight out 221) but headed South on Rte. 8 and then northeast on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Bent Mountain and then back on U.S. 221. So much for saving money on gas.
See you on the road.
Guess we’re all just a bunch of hicks
Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, the legendary Democratic political consultant who lives on Bent Mountain, brought a columnist and photographer from Denver’s Rocky Mountain News to Floyd recently to write about our "culture" and how it might play out in the upcoming Presidential election.
What we got was stereotyped trash that failed to capture Floyd’s culture, our heritage or the Friday Night Jamboree.
An example of columnist Mike Littwin’s brand of "journalism":
We’re taking "The Crooked Road" music trail – an aptly named back road that, I’m told, will lead us directly to music heaven, which is apparently located on a stage in the back of the Floyd Country Store. Every Friday night, when they hold their gospel and bluegrass and old-timey-music jamboree, this town of 432 turns into a festival of banjo-pickin’ and flat-footin’ – a mini-bluegrass Woodstock, except with no nudity in evidence but, as compensation, some mighty nice-looking store-bought coveralls.
The pickers and the flat-footers and the whoopers and the hollerers spill out from the store and onto the streets and over to the ice cream store (it’s a dry county) and onto the benches and wherever else they can grab a seat or, even better, grab a partner – no age requirement, but it seems to help if you’re on the, uh, north side of 60.
The pickers who drive out of the mountains to jam here in the streets set the beat, and while I’m not sure exactly where they invented toe-tapping and knee-slapping, it couldn’t have been far from here.
If that’s not culture, well, gah-dayem, what is?
Frankly, I expected more from Mudcat, the man who built much of his political consultant reputation on Mark Warner’s ride to the governor’s mansion. Apparently he and Littwin worked together at a newspaper once and that’s why he brought the Denver reporter here.
Memo to Mike Littwin: The "ice cream store" is in the Floyd County Store, not across the street. Floyd County is far from "dry." We have nationally-acclaimed wineries here. They serve beer and wine at most restaurants and you can even get a mixed drink down at Ray’s on U.S. 221. The Crooked Road runs for a spell along U.S. 221, a well-maintained federal highway that is not much of a "back road." On any Friday night, you can find as many kids and teenagers in the Jamboree as older folks.
Sorry you missed all that Mike. But since you’re into stereotypes, let me ask this: Were you, perhaps, on a Rocky Mountain high when you came to Floyd?