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A Week of Firsts

There are many firsts for me this legislative session. One of them has been the budget bill moving earlier than I or many other experienced Capitol dwellers have ever seen it move. The state Senate and House of Delegates came to a compromise on the budget bill on day 51. This was done for the most part to get the bill to Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk so he would have five days to consider it prior to the end of the session. If Morrisey does any line-item vetoes to the budget bill, the Legislature would have time to override those vetoes. Vetoes of regular bills take a simple ...

Open Borders Don’t Help Immigration

In 2002, my son Danny and his wife Mary Jo had begun trying to obtain a visa for Aaliyah, Danny’s Filipino stepdaughter, for nearly two years, but to no avail. It was very frustrating since Danny was an active, career U. S. Army Sergeant. Upon returning from over a year of deployment in Iraq in 2005, Dan and his family were reassigned to a tour of duty in Germany. While in Germany, they continued to apply for a United States visa for Aaliyah at the state department in Frankfurt. No luck. It was then that they asked Peggy if she and I would try to contact politicians at home to ...

Don’t Let Scam Kiosks Hijack Bitcoin’s Name

Imagine this situation for just one second: In a convenience store or grocery store, an older neighbor stands at a "Bitcoin ATM," phone pressed to their ear, cash in hand. A voice on the other end is rushing them, “a warrant is out,” or, “a bank account is frozen,” or even worse, “ a grandchild is in trouble,” - something that can only be fixed if they feed cash into the machine immediately. These scams are absolutely brutal: once that cash is converted into crypto and sent, it can be gone in minutes. It’s straight-up theft, and it is fast, humiliating, and often ...

Hope Stays Intact

Much as I predicted last week, the Hope Scholarship educational voucher program remains intact for the next fiscal year. Instead of recommending its first originating bill to reform the Hope program, the House Finance Committee recommended a new originating bill that only changed the payment frequency to Hope families from two times per year to four times. Some are saying the committee buckled under pressure from current home school and private school families. That’s a complete misunderstanding of what happened. The reason the first originating bill was drafted was to deal with ...

More Insurance Benefits Must Get to Patients

I have practiced orthodontics in Wheeling for 45 years. I have sat across from parents who budget carefully for braces, cleanings, and routine dental care. I have watched families try to stretch insurance benefits that look much the same as they did nearly half a century ago. Now, we have numbers that confirm what many of us have seen firsthand. The West Virginia Office of the Insurance Commissioner recently released updated dental loss ratio data. On average, only 43 cents of every premium dollar in our state goes toward patient care. Think about that for a moment. Families and ...

West Virginia Now Finds Itself at a Real Crossroads

The legislative session is nearly over and very little has been accomplished by the state Senate that would help move the state forward. The House of Delegates has been working through a package of economic development bills that would help to attract new job creators to our state. Gov. Morrisey has proposed a state budget with a 5% income tax cut. Meanwhile, the state Senate continues to focus on legislation that is not likely to help our state prosper. West Virginia continues to have the lowest workforce participation rate in the country. There have been no significant job ...