Only if you can get one:
"Review shows health licensing boards voted improperly" by Todd WallackGlobe Staff November 29, 2014
Four Massachusetts health licensing boards met nearly three dozen times over five years without enough members present, casting a legal cloud over numerous votes on disciplinary proceedings, license applications, and investigations, according to an internal audit by the Department of Public Health.
The review, which confirms concerns first raised by the Globe a year ago, found the boards of pharmacy, physician assistants, dentistry, and perfusionists (who operate heart-lung machines during surgery) held 465 votes without a quorum from January 2008 to May 2013. Two observers said they were shocked by the number of votes affected.
“It is rather disappointing,” said Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, a government watchdog group. “We can’t have boards making decisions without a quorum. It is a basic principle of good government.”
That may explain why we do not have it here in Massachusetts.
Some of the improper votes were procedural, such as approving minutes. But many affected substantive issues, such as approving license applications, deciding whether to investigate complaints, and determining what disciplinary action to take.
For instance, after initially voting at a legal board meeting to shut down a Webster compounding pharmacy that gave a teenager medicine that was 1,000 times too potent, triggering a heart attack, a handful of board members voted to reverse the action at a meeting a week later without a legal quorum. The pharmacy has since closed on its own, and DPH is continuing to investigate the matter.
Then they are responsible for a death, aren't they?
The audit’s findings potentially mean any aggrieved party could go to court to challenge the decisions and raise questions about the integrity of the process.
It's described as “bizarre,” but I see it as standard operating procedure these days.
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DPH acknowledged that state health boards also held countless additional votes that would not be allowed under their current understanding of the law.
Then there is some ILLEGALITY here, huh?
Those votes were not flagged in the audit because lawyers at the time thought they were complying with the quorum rules, which generally require boards to have a majority of members present.
DPH attorneys historically believed boards were permitted to vote with fewer members present when some seats were unfilled. If a five-member board had four vacancies, they figured the board only needed one person for a quorum instead of the usual three....
And that, my dearly beloved readers, is a DICTATORSHIP!
State health officials said they do not plan to revisit old votes affected by the ruling. A Health and Human Services official said it would “wreak havoc” if officials had to apply the guidance retrospectively....
Yeah, who cares about law-breaking when it is the state -- the chief law enforcement entity -- that does it?
The quorum-less meetings are just the latest in a series of embarrassing management missteps by the Department of Public Health under Governor Deval Patrick.
It is part of the absolutely abysmal legacy this guy is leaving for Baker to clean up.
The department’s drug lab was shut down in 2012 after investigators discovered that a chemist falsified thousands of drug tests, tainting decisions in many criminal cases.
Okay, that would be the Dookhan scandal that casts doubt on all state drug labs.
That same year, the state fired the pharmacy board’s executive director for failing to act on a complaint about a Framingham compounding pharmacy that was later blamed for 64 deaths and sickening hundreds of other patients.
It's a real conundrum that no one has been charged with murder.
And last June, the agency scuttled licenses for nine of 20 medical marijuana facilities that won preliminary approval after questions emerged about their applications.
I'm tired of talking about it, and would you please take it outside?
And I didn't even mention the Bridgewater debacle, the heroin crisis on his watch, or the website failures.
It also reflects the state’s larger struggle to keep track of a sprawling labyrinth of state boards.
Many of which are not needed at all and simply provide a way for the state to stick its nose in.
A Globe review earlier this year found more than one-third of the seats on about 700 state boards were either vacant or filled with members whose terms have since expired. In some cases, boards had to regularly cancel meetings because they couldn’t muster a quorum, while it appears some other boards simply ignored the quorum requirements and met anyway.
It was a matter of life and death, right?
Related: Board With My Boston Sunday Globe
It's all pretend!
At least the Legislature is looking after things.
The governor’s office, which handles the bulk of appointments to state boards, recently removed dozens of moribund boards from its website and said it is trying to fill positions on remaining boards. But it is constantly dealing with waves of new resignations and also is constrained by specific requirements set by the Legislature....
I'm so sick of lame-ass excuses coming from government.
They claim they are your saving benefactor, and then they fail mi$erably.
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Related: DIA judge claims governor retaliating by not reappointing her
At least the state health website is working:
"1 in 10 hit snag on Mass. Health Connector site; Officials say system works as expected" by Felice J. Freyer, Globe Staff November 24, 2014
They spent a quarter of a BILLION dollars to get a 10% error rate, and are saying that is what was expected?
Look, I'm not trying to be quarrelsome, but in the business world -- or any other world, for that matter -- that is considered a colossal failure. Imagine if bank ATMs screwed up 1 in every 10 transactions.
About 5,000 people applying for health insurance have been temporarily locked out of the Massachusetts Health Connector’s website because of difficulties proving their identities online — an issue that Connector officials call inevitable and similar to experiences in other states.
Software glitches are not to blame, said Maydad Cohen, the state official overseeing the website’s reconstruction. Instead, requests for more documentation to verify identities are evidence of a necessarily rigorous process, he said.
“The system is operating exactly as it was built to,” Cohen said, by trying to ascertain “that you are who you say you are when you’re applying.”
But those caught in this snag — about 10 percent of people who attempted to log into the health insurance site — find it maddening.
“It makes you go crazy. This has been very tough,” said Lesley Hausmann of Lexington, who had to mail in a copy of her husband’s driver’s license.
“It’s infuriating,” said Richard Pask of North Truro, who mailed copies of his and his wife’s passports last week and is still waiting to hear back. “It’s like a Kafka novel.”
Despite a smattering of such complaints, Cohen said the Connector had kept its promise to provide a well-performing website to Massachusetts residents who do not get health insurance from an employer.
What makes one sick is the same state shit shovel in the face of it all.
In the Connector website’s first seven days, 51,967 signed on and learned what kind of health coverage they are eligible for — the key function that software was unable to perform last year, after it was retooled to comply with the federal Affordable Care Act....
Yeah, Obummer destroyed the website.
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Also see: Quincy says goodbye to hospital ‘up the hill’
Related: Hospital Shark Tank
So are you ready to reenroll?
See: 1 million people apply for health care in first week
Obama administration officials said, and that is when I stopped reading, knowing its all self-serving lies.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: GOP calls for Gruber’s ouster from Health Connector board
