[naviga:h3]Cheer [/naviga:h3]

The Pennsylvania Board of Osteopathic Medicine fired a warning shot this week when it refused to allow Thomas C. Barone, a Philadelphia-based pain management physician linked to four patient deaths, to return to his practice.

Barone, who has not been charged with any crime, had his license suspended two years ago after investigators accused him of recklessly prescribing tens of thousands of pills. The pills — most of them opioids — all went to four patients who later died of overdoses. One died from a heroin overdose.

The board did not give a reason for its actions, but the message is clear: We won’t tolerate irresponsibility and unethical behavior among those with the power to prescribe highly-addictive and deadly narcotic painkillers.

They shouldn’t, and patients shouldn’t have to. Hopefully the board’s action in this matter will resonate with Barone’s colleagues across the commonwealth.

[naviga:h3]Jeer [/naviga:h3]

On one hand, it’s probably a good thing that state officials are already talking budget priorities. Given how ramshackle the process has been recently, a head start couldn’t hurt.

But the good doesn’t come close to offsetting the bad: a $600 million budget shortfall that could grow even larger in coming months, depending on whether Republicans can deliver on promises they made to raise new revenue by expanding gambling.

The state’s nonpartisan Independent Fiscal Office says the gap could reach $1.7 billion when the new fiscal year starts in July.

This game of chicken has become an annual tradition in the commonwealth. Republicans pledge to overhaul government and privatize services; Democrats propose tax hikes. A political food fight ensues. Collaboration and compromise go right out the window.

Both sides are always short on specifics and long on promises that taxpayers, at this point, have no reason to believe will be delivered upon.

Maybe it’s time to try a novel approach to this chronic problem: actually working together for once.

[naviga:h3]Cheer [/naviga:h3]

Working across the aisle in Washington, D.C., seems to be getting rarer by the day, but U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy (R) and Sen. Bob Casey (D) are united behind one effort: getting to the bottom of alleged bias in a CDC investigation of the Pittsburgh VA Healthcare System’s Legionnaires’ outbreak.

Recently-published e-mails appear to show that personal bias against two VA officials in Pittsburgh may have played a role in how the CDC presented information on the outbreak to Congress in 2013. One CDC official, Cynthia Whitney, wrote that the investigation “will have a bit of poetic justice to it.”

The point here is simple: personal bias and petty interpersonal squabbles have no place in the business of an agency like the CDC, where science and fact are supposed to rule the day. Congress needs to exert itself and nip this kind of behavior in the bud.

Now Whitney and other CDC officials might find themselves the object of congressional grilling. How’s that for poetic justice?