No competition for school bus contracts poses problem

By Susan Spencer
Telegram & Gazette Staff

Posted Dec 16, 2017 at 8:00 PM  

Updated Dec 16, 2017 at 11:26 PM

School transportation costs hit municipal budgets hard across the state, and several communities in Central Massachusetts have been grumbling about an underlying factor as their multiyear contracts for school buses are about to go out for bid. The problem: There’s no competition in the market.

Despite having a number of school bus companies operating nearby, district after district contacted by the Telegram & Gazette reported usually having just one vendor submit a bid.

Industry representatives say the problem stems from consolidation, with large bus companies buying out the mom-and-pops that used to provide local service.

And with regulatory requirements for 60 hours of training, paid earned sick time and health insurance assessments for what is a part-time job, “it’s a business that over the years has gotten more difficult to be in,” said David Strong, president of the School Transportation Association of Massachusetts and owner of a family-run bus company in Easthampton.

School bus drivers, who typically make around $20 an hour in suburban districts and $25 to $30 an hour in cities, according to Mr. Strong, are hard to find as the economy improves.

Some school districts have explored partnerships with others or are considering operating their own school bus service.

On Thursday, representatives from five area districts agreed to pursue joint procurement through the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission, as a way of pooling their buying power and negotiating better rates.

The districts working to issue a joint request for bids, to be opened in early February, include Auburn, Dudley-Charlton, Leicester, Oxford and Webster.

A sixth district, Millbury, hopes to join the procurement group when its current three-year contract ends in 2020.

Richard G. Bedard Jr., business manager for Millbury Public Schools, said that only once in the last several contract cycles did the district receive more than one bid. That second bid came from a national company based in Illinois and carried a higher price.

Millbury has contracted with AA Transportation Co. of Shrewsbury since its previous vendor, Atlantic Express, declared bankruptcy in 2013, in the middle of the school year.

“We really try to cultivate anyone we think might be able to respond,” Mr. Bedard said.

In 2016, he sent bid packets to 13 firms, but again only AA responded.

The district spends more than $1 million a year for 11 buses, two 20-passenger shuttle buses and a three-passenger in-district wheelchair bus with a monitor. AA provides buses for athletics and field trips and after-school runs as part of the contract.

Several area vendors attended the bid opening last December for the contract but didn’t submit bids of their own.

AA’s prices in Millbury’s three-year contract increase around 3 percent a year. In the company’s previous contract, for school years ending in 2015 through 2017, annual increases approached 5 percent.

“On the one hand, I want to commend AA for coming to our support (when Atlantic Express quit),” Millbury Superintendent of Schools Gregory B. Myers said. “On the other hand, it showed that maybe the capacity had already been there.”

This old drug was free. Now it’s $109,500 a year.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson  
December 18 at 7:00 AM

“It's either: People get ripped off, but they live, or they don't get ripped off, and they die. It's a little bit of a blackmail situation,” said Jacob Levitt, who has watched the price hikes with dismay. “The business model is a little bit taking advantage of making a cheap drug very expensive.”

For decades, Don Anderson of Seattle has been taking the same drug to help control the temporary bouts of immobility and muscle weakness caused by a rare and frightening genetic illness called periodic paralysis.

“It's like putting a 50-pound pack on your back and standing up at the dinner table,” Anderson, 73, said. “It's like wearing lead shoes around all the time.”

The drug Anderson has been taking all these years was originally approved in 1958 and used primarily to treat the eye disease glaucoma under the brand name Daranide, its price so unremarkable that he can't quite remember how much it cost at the pharmacy counter.

But the price has been on a roller coaster in recent years — zooming from a list price of $50 for a bottle of 100 pills in the early 2000s up to $13,650 in 2015, then plummeting back down to free, before skyrocketing back up to $15,001 after a new company, Strongbridge Biopharma, acquired the drug and relaunched it this spring.

“I'm constantly hearing that public pressure, public shaming will be sufficient to curb these bad actors in these industries. It often feels if you take your attention off of them, even for a second, they'll revert to these old ways,” said Rachel Sachs, an associate law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. “It’s just another example of how the system has some problems that need to be fixed.”

The zigzagging trajectory of the price of Daranide, now known as Keveyis, shows just how much freedom drug companies have in pricing therapies — and what a big business opportunity selling extremely-rare-disease drugs has become. It also illustrates how well-intentioned policy to help spur the development of “orphan” drugs for very rare diseases can have unintended consequences.

[High prices make once-neglected ‘orphan’ drugs a booming business] 

 

Daranide was approved half a century ago, often used to treat glaucoma. Some people with the rare neuromuscular condition, periodic paralysis, began taking it off-label to help control their disease. With a list price of $50 for 100 pills in 2001, it wasn't a drug people remember as hard to obtain.

(Pricing data was obtained from Truven Health Analytics, part of the IBM Watson Health business.)
In the early 2000s, Daranide was discontinued by Merck. Other glaucoma treatments were available, but a small group of periodic paralysis patients who had found that it controlled their symptoms better than other drugs were left with few options. They found ways to get the drug, importing it from Europe or South Korea. Anderson recalls the expense as about $250 or $300 a month.

Chicago Politician Requests Child-raping UN Troops ... in America

Chicago Politician Requests Child-raping UN Troops ... in America 

Friday, 15 December 2017 

Written by  Alex Newman

Under the guise of stopping “gun violence” and “genocide,” a fringe County Commissioner in Cook County, Illinois, went to New York City to request that the United Nations deploy “peacekeeping” troops in Chicago. Seriously. These would be the same ruthless soldiers who have come under fire around the world for systemic rape of children, spreading deadly diseases, murdering unarmed protesters, overthrowing elected leaders, waging war on Africans who did not want to live under a Soviet-backed dictator, and countless other atrocities — especially atrocities targeting black people, and always perpetrated with impunity.

Of course, the dictators club known as the UN has no legal power to deploy its scandal-plagued forces in America, and most Americans, armed with hundreds of millions of weapons, would be unlikely to accept such an absurdity. But the fact that such a ludicrous request would even be contemplated, particularly by an elected official, highlights a number of major problems that threaten liberty and the nation itself. At the top of the list of those problems is the sort of dangerous ignorance of some voters and their politicians that would consider inviting child-raping foreign troops — many of them loyal to mass-murdering Communist and Islamic dictators — on to American soil to keep the peace.

In a tacit acknowledgment that he is incapable of doing the job voters elected him to do — and perhaps an indication that he believes his constituents are incapable of governing themselves — Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin began calling for UN troops in Chicago this week. “I’m hoping to appeal to the UN to actually come to Chicago and meet with victims of violence, and maybe even possibly help out in terms of peacekeeping efforts, because I think it’s so critical for us to make sure that these neighborhoods are safe,” Boykin was quoted as saying while waiting for his flight to New York on Thursday.

Boykin, who has been living off taxpayer largess since he was a child and appears to have been employed by government in some capacity for virtually his entire career, claimed “leaders” in Chicago and Cook County had “failed” to protect their communities from violent crime. And so, since local officials seem to be incapable of providing even basic services despite some of the highest taxes in America, the far-left activist believes the UN — an organization dominated by oppressive governments, many of which murder and torture their own subjects with impunity — could do a better job providing security. That speaks volumes about Boykin and those who elected him.

“There is a quiet genocide taking place in too many of our communities,” Boykin said, without noting that the UN and Planned Parenthood have for generations displayed a passion for reducing the number of black people in the world. “Eighty percent of those who are being killed by gun violence are African American, and often killed at the hands of another African American. So we must protect these population groups, and that’s what the United Nations does. They’re a peacekeeping force. They know all about keeping the peace, and so we’re hopeful that they’ll hear our appeal.”

In reality, the UN's “peacekeeping” schemes have resulted in the widespread rape and killing of black people all over the world by UN forces. The UN's first major “peace” mission, for example, involved bombing and slaughtering civilians in Katanga, who had declared independence to avoid living under a barbarous Soviet-backed dictator, until they were brutally massacred into submission. The