Afterward, a LARA representative told me to my face that paper mail-in option would always be available for nurse license renewal because they know about poor internet access. Yet within a few years, the paper option disappeared.

The air of superior inevitability did not go unnoticed.

My prediction is that today's statement limiting the new system to facilities is not worth the pixels it was printed with. That line will shift just as soon as it pleases LARA to exert its considerable control over another segment of Michigan licenses.

LARA's announcement via email today does not appear on its press release page, so I have no link.

Michigan State Licensing System (MI-SLS) is Now Live!

The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), Bureau of Community and Health Systems (BCHS) is pleased to announce the launch of the new Michigan State Licensing System (MI-SLS), a modernized platform designed to streamline internal processes and external submissions by applicants and licensees to make it easier for health care providers, programs, and agencies to complete licensure activities. This enhanced system reflects LARA’s ongoing commitment to improving efficiency, accessibility, and the overall experience for licensed health care facilities across the state. The new system is only for state licensed county medical care facilities, homes for the aged, hospices, hospitals, nursing homes, surgery centers, and substance use disorder services programs.

The new system will start with access through MiLogin. You can use your existing MiLogin account or create one if you don’t already have an account. Please do not create an additional account if one already exists. If you already have a MiLogin Account, you can use that existing account to request access to MI-SLS. Please do not create an additional MiLogin Account

Please review the following videos and user guides to help navigate the new system:

MiLogin Account Setup
Video: {Click Here}
User Guide: {Click Here}
Requesting Access to MI-SLS
Video: {Click Here}
User Guide: {Click Here}
Linking Your License(s) to your MI-SLS Account
Video: {Click Here}
User Guide: {Click Here}
MI-SLS License Details Page
Video: {Click Here}
User Guide: {Click Here}
For additional information, please visit our website at www.michigan.gov/bchs.

If you have any questions or issues with setting up your new MI-SLS profile, please contact us using the following methods:

For technical/MiLogin assistance contact
LARA-BCHS-App-Help@michigan.gov or 1-833-757-7309.

For Long-Term-Care MI-SLS assistance contact
LARA-BCHS-LTCSLS@michigan.gov or 1-877-458-2757.

For Non-Long-Term-Care MI-SLS assistance contact
LARA-BCHS-NLTCSLS@michigan.gov or 1-833-757-7308.

Thank You,
State Licensing Section
Bureau of Community and Health Systems

It all began with dentist licensing. With access barriers at dental schools and the dental licensing board, shortages worsened.

As Mackinac Center reports, access to care continues to be a major problem. Hotlinks in the source article.

https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2026/michigan-legalized-dental-therapists-in-2018-but-only-a-few-practice

Michigan legalized dental therapists in 2018, but only a few practice

State officials should pick up the pace of regulatory reform

Michael Van Beek    |    May 18, 2026

At a Mackinac Center event on how states can improve healthcare coverage and reduce costs, a panelist mentioned using dental therapists to expand access to dental care and make it more affordable. These midlevel providers practice under the supervision of a dentist but provide more services than a dental hygienist. Michigan law lets them practice, but the required regulatory changes are being implemented at the speed of bureaucracy.

Lawmakers created a dental therapist license in 2018. The rationale was to expand dental care in underserved regions, such as rural areas. Dental therapists specialize in providing the most common services that typical patients need, and they can operate clinics at a lower cost than a full-fledged dental practice. This enables them to provide services in places with lower population density.

But in the eight years since the law was enacted, the state has licensed just two dental therapists: one in 2025 and one last month. Despite this dismal record, the state health department claims that expanding access to care via dental therapists is “an important focus for the department.”

Compare this to Minnesota’s experience. Lawmakers there created a dental therapist license in 2009, the nation’s first. Within five years the state endorsed 32 therapists who served about 6,300 patients over a 16-month period.

Michigan lawmakers expected something similar here. They required the state health department to publish a report seven years after the law took effect to assess its impact. It required measurements of how many new patients dental therapists served and the outcomes of the new license, such as reductions in patient wait times, distance traveled to receive care and emergency room use.

The department published the study in April. With just two dental therapists licensed, there was nothing to report to the Legislature. The department blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for delaying “workforce development activities and the establishment of in-state education and training pathways.”

To be fair, the state faces a significant challenge in licensing new dental therapists: There are no dental therapist training programs in Michigan and only five in the whole country. That makes it difficult for the state to grow and train its own dental therapists.

In Minnesota, on the other hand, the University of Minnesota and Metro State University both enrolled students in dental therapy training programs just months after lawmakers created the license. To its credit, Michigan’s health department is partnering with Ferris State University to establish a training program. It is “anticipated to launch,” the department says, in 2028.

Minnesota showed that dental therapy can move from statute to real-world patient care in just a few years. Michigan, by contrast, has spent nearly a decade inching forward. If state officials are serious about improving access and affordability, they should follow the evidence — and pick up the pace.

Some enterprising investigators from WC Dispatch's Corruption Watch have found that companies dissolved by LARA still have National Provider Identifiers (NPI) registered on the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) registry and are billing the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) for big bucks.  They have identified 21 dissolved Michigan corporations, entities LARA had declared legally dead, billed MDHHS for $ 118.8 million after their LARA dissolution dates.  This isn't just a paperwork error, it is deliberate fraud.

Walter Curt of WC Dispatch uses the case of Grace Points, Inc. in Dearborn to illustrate the intricate frauds taking place and how they are concealed from scrutiny:

https://www.wcdispatch.com/p/something-stinks-in-michigan

https://www.wcdispatch.com/p/the-new-michigan-medicaid-fraud-machine

Something Stinks in Michigan
Dead Companies, Demolished Buildings, and Hundreds of Millions of Your Taxpayer Dollars.
By Walter Curt - Apr 19, 2026

Editor's note: Welcome to the second installment of Corruption Watch, WC Dispatch's investigative series exposing the leftists, illegal aliens, and NGOs defrauding Americans. We're proud to partner with Restoration News to amplify these on-the-ground investigations, beginning in Michigan. Read the first installment HERE

What do a demolished building, a dental office, and an immigrant hub have in common? In Michigan, they’re all billing Medicaid, and you’re paying for it.

We went looking for a lead. All we found was a demolition team eating lunch.

That crew gave us information that sent us to 21 dissolved businesses and $118.8 million in post-dissolution claims. Grace Points Inc. was the demolished building.

Medicaid records showed the company was tied to $2.4 million in billing, but when we went to the address on file in Dearborn, all that was there was a gutted shell: no walls, no windows, no sign, no suite numbers, just a parking lot that had not seen a patient in years.

When we pulled the records, the story got worse.

Dead on Paper, Billing on Schedule

Grace Points Inc. was not just physically gone. It was legally dead.

Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) shows Grace Points Inc. was dissolved effective March 24, 2023, and the certificate was filed with the state a week later. On paper, the company was done.

In case you need proof this company wasn’t in operation, here’s what it looks like today:

But the billing did not stop. Medicaid claims data show the Grace Points NPI (National Provider Identifier 1962920397), registered on the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) registry to “Grace Points Inc.” at 23400 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, kept billing through November 2024, more than twenty months after the corporation ceased to exist on Michigan’s books. A single month of claims from February 2022 pre-dates the dissolution. Everything else—the overwhelming majority of the $2.42 million in total claims across roughly fourteen beneficiaries—came after the state’s records said Grace Points Inc. was done.

Fourteen beneficiaries––$2.42 million. That works out to roughly $173,000 per person over 33 months. At the H2015 reimbursement rate, that implies more than eight hours of community habilitation services per beneficiary per day, every single day, for 33 straight months. That is physically impossible.

To understand how that happens, you have to understand two things: who was running Grace Points, and what happened to the name itself in Michigan’s business registry around the dissolution.

The Omauvezi Network

One name connects every piece of this: Oghenereke Lisa Omauvezi.

Except it never appears the same way twice. Across the Medicaid billing, the federal contracting paperwork, and the Michigan corporate filings, the same signer reappears as Lisa Oghenereke Omauvezi, Elizabeth Oghenereke Omavuezi, and Elizabeth Omavuezi-Eke. The middle name holds. The surname shifts by a single letter. The first name alternates between Lisa and Elizabeth. A clerk searching one variant would not find the others.

She is the Authorized Official on NPPES for NPI 1962920397—the Grace Points Medicaid provider identifier—at 23400 Michigan Avenue, Suite P44, in Dearborn. The registry of federal contractors, SAM.gov, lists her as the point of contact for Grace Point LLC at the same street address in Suite P30.

Same building. Different suite. Same person. Two separate federal registries pointing at a Dearborn address that appears nowhere on the state database.

Just as the signer’s name shifted across records, the corporate name shifted across filings. The state record kept cycling names. The federal record stayed parked at the building.

Laundering The Name

There was not one clean Grace Points corporate history. There was a cluster.

The entity dissolved by Elizabeth Omavuezi-Eke on March 24, 2023 was Grace Points Inc. (LARA ID 802432113), and that is where it starts to stink.

A separate corporation (LARA ID 801985904) was actually the original Grace Points Inc. Incorporated on January 19, 2017, by one Oghenereke Lisa Omauvezi, but the name didn’t hold long. In the Articles of Incorporation, the corporation’s purpose appears in one handwritten line: “Staffing Agency.” Not healthcare.

In April 2018, Lisa Oghenereke Omauvezi filed a Certificate of Amendment to rename Grace Points Inc. as “Grace Staffing Solutions Inc.”— the word “Points” accidentally dropped. A May correction added the missing word, producing “Grace Points Staffing Solutions Inc.” Then a second correction, filed in June, voided the entire amendment and restored Grace Points Inc. Apparently she couldn’t make up her mind.

But she wasn’t done. In December 2019, Lisa Omauvezi filed a new amendment — and this one stuck. Effective March 15, 2020, Grace Points Inc. legally became Omega Staffing Solutions, clearing the Grace Points name off of 801985904’s books.

Just two days later, she opened a second shell. On March 17, 2020, Lisa Omauvezi signed the Articles of Incorporation for a new Grace Points Inc. Same registered office at 835 Mason Street in Dearborn. Same authorized shares: 60,000. Same one-line stated purpose: “Staffing Agency.” LARA accepted the filing on March 24, 2020. The legal name “Grace Points Inc.” had been off the books for less than a week before it was back on Michigan’s registry—attached to a parallel corporation at the same Dearborn mailbox.

By February 2022, the shell was put to work. Medicaid paid $84,814 to “Grace Points Inc.” at 23400 Michigan Avenue in Dearborn. It was the test payment—proof that the parallel shell was already active, already billing, and already positioned to carry the Grace Points Inc. name while the original corporation continued as Omega Staffing Solutions.

Now the whole scheme was in motion.

The Loop

On March 24, 2023, Grace Points Inc. was formally dissolved, freeing the name in Michigan’s registry. Seven days later, on March 31, Omega Staffing Solutions changed its name back to Grace Points Inc.

The same person, Elizabeth Oghenereke Omavuezi, signed both moves: first dissolving one Grace Points, then restoring the name to the other. LARA accepted the rename on April 19, 2023. From that date forward, a still-living corporation had re-occupied the name of a corporation that had just been killed off a week earlier.

The effect, across every downstream system that tracks providers by name—NPPES, Michigan Medicaid’s provider files, banks, insurers, payers—was that “Grace Points Inc.” had never gone anywhere. The name stayed alive. The NPI stayed active. And that is when the real billing run began: the entire $2.42 million, minus the first test payment of $84,814, was billed only after one Grace Points had been dissolved and the other had stepped into its name.

Then, in February 2025, the loop closed. Grace Points Inc. was renamed back to Omega Staffing Solutions Inc. the very same day Omega filed to do business as “Grace Points Inc.” The DBA was filed again in August. Then, in October 2025, the paperwork was amended so the legal name read, literally, “GRACE POINTS INC/DBA OMEGA STAFFING SOLUTIONS INC.” Both identities, folded into a single line.

This is what name laundering looks like in practice. A name is loaded into a corporate shell and billed against. When scrutiny catches up, the shell is retired. A parallel shell with the same name absorbs or masks the history. Then the name is cycled back to the continuing operation under a legal maneuver that, read one filing at a time, looks unremarkable—but read as a sequence. It’s a closed loop designed to make sure “Grace Points Inc.” was always legally attached to the cluster, no matter when an auditor pulls the records.

Riding the Wave

What happened at Grace Points was no clerical error. It was choreography. With the name-laundering loop complete, the real billing run began—and it never paused.

The timing of the main run tells the rest. In April 2023, the claims came roaring back—the same month Michigan finalized the name swap that put “Grace Points Inc.” back on the state’s books, and just days before Michigan Democrats’ Behavioral Health Home expansion took effect on May 1—Grace Points rode the wave.

The federal paperwork never matched either. In March 2021, an entity calling itself Grace Points Inc. took a $114,523 pandemic-related Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan from the Small Business Association classified under financial services—not healthcare—for a company whose only line of work was community habilitation for people with developmental disabilities. At that moment, the continuing corporation in the cluster was not even legally named Grace Points Inc. It was Omega Staffing Solutions. Federal lending records, state corporate records, and federal Medicaid records all carried different names for the same operation.

Grace Points was not an outlier. The pattern ran deeper.

Ghost Corporations

Grace Points Inc. became the blueprint we needed.

On the hunt for more dead businesses, we ran more than 600 Michigan Medicaid entities against the state’s LARA business registry. What came back was not a handful of bad actors, but a graveyard.

Twenty-one dissolved Michigan corporations, entities the state itself had declared legally dead, exposed $118.8 million in Medicaid billing after their dissolution dates. Not suspicious billing. Not bad paperwork––companies that no longer legally existed. The details made Grace Points look modest.

Tema Pefok’s Precious Care Home Health Care, Inc. was dissolved by the state back in 2014 and then sat quiet. In September 2023—almost a decade after Precious Care legally ceased to exist—it suddenly reappeared in the Medicaid billing stream and pulled in $2.3 million. Every dollar of it came after dissolution.

Ikechukwu Obum’s MICHOLDINGS billed $15.2 million after the state legally dissolved the business in 2022. Tari Efebo of Serenity Community Care actually waited six months after dissolution before billing Medicaid—and continued to do so for several consecutive years at nearly half a million dollars a year. How nice of him to wait?

And then there was Dental Medical Services Inc. This one deserves honorable mention because you cannot make it up. Dental Medical Services ceased to exist in 2004 through a corporate merger. More than a decade later, it began billing Medicaid for developmental disability treatments, to the tune of $4 million.

You get the point. The pattern persists across all twenty-one entities—different names, different addresses, same result. $118.8 million billed through companies the state itself had declared dead. The question was no longer who was doing this. It was how they were getting away with it.

How it Happened

The reason this kept happening is simple, and damning. Michigan’s LARA tracks whether corporations are legally alive or dead. The state’s Medicaid system controls enrollment and payments. The two do not appear to meaningfully talk to each other. So when LARA dissolves a corporation, nothing automatically stops the money. No notice to the Medicaid system. No lock on enrollment. No audit flag. Claims keep getting submitted and paid through companies that no longer legally exist under Michigan law.

As one might imagine, this opens up the floodgates for fraud and abuse.

That failure carries real consequences. A dissolved corporation is not supposed to remain in the payment stream collecting taxpayer money as if nothing happened. Under federal law, false claims can trigger treble damages and steep per-claim penalties, and health care fraud can carry serious prison time. In plain English, Lansing is left with only a few possibilities: fraud, negligence, or a regulatory structure so broken it functionally invited both.

None of this was hidden. Grace Points and the twenty-one other dissolved corporations were operating in plain sight, across records any Michigan resident can pull on a laptop—corporate filings on LARA, provider records on NPPES, federal contracting records on SAM.gov, and the Michigan Medicaid claims data released by DOGE HHS. Put those systems side by side and the gap becomes obvious. A name can be dissolved in one database and still draw money in another. A signer can appear as Lisa on one record and Elizabeth on the next, and no alert connects the two. A shell can be retired, a parallel shell can take its place, and the billing never pauses.

That structural blind spot is what made this investigation possible. Combined with the LARA business registry, the Michigan claims data let us check more than six hundred entities one at a time. No subpoena. No audit staff. No white-collar crime unit. Just a laptop.

And we were working off old data. Michigan Democrats control the executive branch. They sit on top of the live Medicaid billing stream. They also administer the state Health and Human Services Department which is supposed to investigate Medicaid fraud. They could flag every claim being submitted today, every entity currently enrolled, every dollar moving right now—and could cross-check it against LARA in real time.

The investigations seem to have lagged.

If we found twenty-one dead corporations and $118.8 million in a stale snapshot, the live numbers are almost certainly worse.

We only looked at Michigan. The same structural gap exists in other states, across other service categories, under other billing codes. If this is what one corner of one Democrat-controlled program looks like, the national picture could be staggering.

Nobody has been charged. Nobody has been sued. Nobody has been ordered to give the money back.

As of this writing, every one of these businesses still holds an active National Provider Identifier. Michigan has not publicly revoked a single enrollment. The tools to catch this have existed all along—LARA on one side, the Medicaid system on the other. Matching one against the other is not rocket science.

So the question is whether anyone in Lansing will actually do something about it—or whether this investigation will sit on a desk the same way the dissolution records sat in a database, available to anyone who looked, ignored by everyone who should have.

Data sourced from Michigan Medicaid claims data released by DOGE HHS, calendar years 2018–2024; Michigan LARA MiBusiness Registry (authenticated, April 2026); CMS NPPES API; site visits and field reporting in Dearborn and Detroit, April 2026.

A Tale of Two Graphs (and More); An Investigative History of America's Overdose Crisis by Amy Bianco got little notice when it was published back in May, probably due to its length.  We now have a Cliffs Notes edition by Lynn Webster at The American Council of Science and Health which should provoke some serious thought:

https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/11/21/tale-two-graphs-why-four-phase-opioid-story-falls-apart-49835

https://paingame.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-graphs-and-more

A Tale of Two Graphs – Why the Four-Phase Opioid Story Falls Apart
By Lynn Webster, MD — November 21, 2025

America’s overdose crisis isn’t the simple story we’ve been told for years. A new investigation reveals how two key graphs — one famous, one ignored — shift entirely the way we understand what happened, why deaths keep rising, and why current policies continue to fail. This op-ed explains why the familiar “four-phase opioid epidemic” narrative collapses under scrutiny.

For years, we’ve been told a simple story about the “opioid epidemic”: first, doctors prescribed too many pills, then reformulated OxyContin “drove” people to heroin, then fentanyl arrived, and now a wave of ultra-potent synthetics is killing “naïve” users in record numbers. Four neat phases, one neat villain: prescription opioids.

It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also deeply misleading.

A new multi-part investigation by journalist Amy Bianco at The PAIN GAME—“A Tale of Two Graphs (and More)” is, in my view, the clearest and most honest dismantling of that four-phase storyline that anyone has published to date.

Instead of starting with slogans or cherry-picked timelines, the author goes back to the graphs that shaped public policy: the classic CDC figure showing prescription opioid sales rising in lockstep with “prescription opioid deaths,” and the less famous but far more important Jalal/Burke graph showing that overall overdose deaths have risen on a smooth exponential curve since the late 1970s, across all drugs, long before OxyContin ever appeared.

Once you put those two graphs side by side, the four-phase myth starts to unravel.

What this series does differently

Most commentary treats “Phase One” as a morality play: greedy companies, gullible doctors, and passive patients whose prescriptions inevitably turned into addiction and death. This series refuses that caricature.

It shows how the modern pain movement began in oncology and AIDS care. This was a good-faith effort by clinicians who had seen opioids transform the lives of people in terrible pain, and who reasonably believed that carefully monitored use could help a wider group of patients. It traces how that model depended on time, expertise, and multidisciplinary care—psychology, physical therapy, and careful follow-up—not just a prescription pad.

Then it documents how the insurance industry quietly dismantled those comprehensive pain programs, reimbursing the cheapest elements and starving the rest. By 2015, the number of collaborative pain clinics in the U.S. had collapsed from roughly 1,000 to under 100 outside the VA. What survived in most communities was a 15-minute visit and a bottle of pills—not because physicians were lazy or corrupt, but because the system made everything else nearly impossible.

The piece also exposes something almost no one outside this world has seen: how overdose is coded and counted. “Prescription opioid deaths” on a CDC graph are usually multi-drug deaths where an opioid was present, not the proven cause. When a doctor is under investigation, the pressure on medical examiners to label a death as a “prescription overdose” can be intense—even when the patient had advanced heart disease, cancer, infection or, in one jaw-dropping example, died in a car crash.

Once you understand how messy the “opioid deaths” line really is, the simple Phase One story—“doctor prescribes → patient becomes addicted → patient overdoses”—looks much less like science and much more like a convenient political script.

Beyond four phases: waves, scams, and a rigged ecosystem

One of the most powerful sections comes from a methadone nurse in Maine who describes three overlapping waves of patients she saw between the late 1990s and early 2000s:

• long-time heroin users trying to stabilize
• abandoned chronic pain patients whose doctors cut them off
• young people getting hooked on diverted pills from medicine cabinets and the street

Those three waves alone blow up the idea that Phase One was mostly about “innocent patients turned into addicts by their prescriptions.” The reality was a tangled ecosystem where licit and illicit markets bled into each other, where diversion happened in countless small ways, and where the same pill could mean stability for one person and chaos for another.

The series goes further, tracing what it calls a “hierarchy of scams”: scammers who lied to doctors to get pills; law-enforcement strategies that turned those scammers into witnesses against high-volume prescribers; prosecutors who built careers by portraying pain specialists as kingpins; and insurers and government programs quietly saving money when those practices were shut down and complex patients scattered. All of this was then wrapped in the rhetoric of a new front in the War on Drugs: the “War on Prescription Drug Abuse.”

Meanwhile, as opioid prescriptions have fallen sharply since 2012, deaths from illicit fentanyl and its analogues have exploded. The second CDC graph of the article makes this brutally clear: prescribing plummets while the line of synthetic opioid deaths rockets upward. If pills were truly the singular engine of the crisis, those trends should move together. They don’t.

Why this matters now

If you live with pain, treat people in pain, or care about overdose policy, you already know something is off in the dominant story. Pain patients are being forcibly tapered or abruptly cut off. Clinicians are leaving the field in fear. Yet overdose deaths keep rising, driven by a volatile illicit market that our policies helped create.

Bianco’s series gives you the missing context and language to explain why.

It challenges the “magic molecule” theory which is the idea that a brief encounter with an opioid dooms a large share of people to lifelong addiction. If that were true, routine post-surgical prescribing over the last 50 years would have produced apocalyptic levels of opioid use disorder. It didn’t. The reality is far more nuanced, and far more tied to social conditions, trauma, and long-running failures of the War on Drugs than to any single product or prescription.

Most importantly, Bianco’s pieces insist on telling the story in all its messy, human detail: the patients who did everything “right” and were still treated as suspects; the young people who started using pills as teenagers because they were everywhere and life was hard; and the clinicians and law-enforcement officers who tried to do the right thing inside systems that rewarded spectacle over truth.

An invitation

If you’re tired of being told that the crisis can be explained in four tidy phases and one villain, I’d encourage you to read “A Tale of Two Graphs (and More)” and share it widely.

It doesn’t deny the harms of opioids or the responsibility of industry. It does something braver; it shows how partial truths, weaponized graphs, and a half-century of bad drug policy have combined to produce the catastrophe we’re in, and it explains why doubling down on the same narrative will only make things worse.

If we want policies that save lives and protect people in pain, we have to start by telling the story honestly. This series is a major step in that direction.

Lynn R. Webster, MD, is a pain and addiction medicine specialist and serves as Executive Vice President of Scientific Affairs at Dr. Vince Clinical Research, where he consults with pharmaceutical companies. He is also Senior Fellow, Center for U.S. Policy

Dr. Webster is the author of the forthcoming book, Deconstructing Toxic Narratives—Data, Disparities, and a New Path Forward in the Opioid Crisis, to be published by Springer Nature. He is not a member of any political or religious organization

Ms. Lyu's presentation did not address the increasing unaffordability of health care, which will undoubtedly constrain employment growth as all payers get tapped out:

https://house.mi.gov/Document/?DocumentId=59752&DocumentType=CommitteeTestimony

https://michiganadvance.com/2025/11/05/health-care-and-data-technology-jobs-predicted-to-increase-university-of-michigan-research-shows/

Health care and data technology jobs predicted to increase, University of Michigan research shows
By Katherine Dailey - November 5, 2025

Health care occupations, as well as data science and tech related jobs, are expected to see among the fastest growth in employment between now and 2032, according to a presentation from the University of Michigan’s Economic Growth Institute to the House Education and Workforce Committee on Wednesday.

“This reflects increasing demand for medical service, health care and data driven technologies,” said Mengjie Lyu, a senior researcher with the Economic Growth Institute.

For health care specifically, which is expected to increase by the highest number of jobs within the decade of 2022-2032 — nearly 47,000 jobs — Lyu added that this is “reflecting the impact of an aging population, the growing prevalence of chronic conditions, and higher levels of mental and behavioral health health service needs.”

On the other hand, mining is expected to decrease by the highest percentage of jobs in that time frame, while retail trade is expected to decrease by the greatest number of jobs.

Eight of the top 10 fastest growing occupations, Lyu noted, require at least a bachelor’s degree, and many require further education. The question of licensing and education was a further focus of the presentation.

“We definitely need this overview as we go into what other kinds of careers can we attach to a high school education, and how can we help students find their way earlier in their career track,” noted Rep. Nancy DeBoer (R-Holland), who chairs the committee.

“Michigan has fewer explicit occupational licenses than the national average,” Lyu stated. However, when looking at licensing barriers — additional requirements to do a job that are not directly attached to that career path — Michigan has significantly more than the national and regional averages.

“These licenses and license barriers are concentrated in four major occupation groups, including health care practitioners, technical construction and extraction, personal care and service, and community and social service,” Lyu added.

As for where job openings are coming from, the Economic Growth Institute’s research shows that, across industries, those are stemming from employees leaving a given industry — whether that be a career switch or retirement.

“In other words,” Lyu said, “the majority of available job postings are driven by replacement needs, rather than the net expansion of the occupations.”

“The top 10 occupations with the greatest annual job openings are primarily entry level service and support roles, such as food service retail and largely driven by turnover, rather than the net growth,” she added. “These roles typically require little formal education or experience and offer modest wages, highlighting the need for career development, design and retention strategies in entry level service jobs.”

Ashlee Breitner, the director of the Economic Growth Institute, added that she hoped that the data “will help inform policy discussions on education, licensing and talent development.”

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2025/08/08/assisted-living-center-in-westland-announces-sudden-closure-amid-history-of-violations/

Assisted living center in Westland announces sudden closure amid history of violations
The company announced at the end of July that all residents would have to vacate by Sept. 1
Assisted living center in Westland announces sudden closure amid history of violations
By Noelle Friel - August 7, 2025

WESTLAND, Mich. – Management of an assisted living facility in Westland announced it would be closing its doors, giving residents just over a month to relocate.

The facility, which offers assistance through the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, was taken over by the company Alcore Senior four years ago.

The company shared the decision at the end of July, announcing that all residents would have to vacate by Sept. 1.

The company provided the following statement to Local 4:

“We took over The Westland House after it had already defaulted and was in serious decline. Despite investing over $3 million and doing everything we could to turn it around, the lasting effects of prior mismanagement, COVID, and rising care needs made recovery impossible.

We’ve worked closely with HUD on a responsible closure and are helping every resident transition safely to nearby communities. We’re grateful to the families, staff, and community who stood by us throughout this effort."

Reports from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) reveal 25 separate investigations conducted regarding complaints made about the facility dating back to 2022.

A report from January 2025 revealed that expired medications were found in the staff’s medication carts, and shower logs were incomplete, making it impossible to determine whether residents were being showered consistently. Additionally, one resident was found to have an untreated open sore to the bone.

A report from August 2024 found that residents’ medications were being administered either too early or too late and were not administered according to the prescribing healthcare professional’s orders. The report again found that a resident’s wounds were not being consistently treated.

In a report from September 2023, two staff members reportedly stated that many of the residents’ call lights were “broken” and experienced delays in call light response times because they were not notified when the light was on. All of the reports can be accessed on LARA’s website.

Executive Vice President of Alcore, Senior Chris Schott, acknowledged the reports, stating that the company had obtained a “Home for the Aged” (HFA) exempt license and began outsourcing medical care through a third-party company, The Medical Team, to improve residents’ care.

Two former employees, Brielle Daniels and Brianne Brewer, claim they continued serving meals to residents until a week before the facility announced its decision to close.

Both reported seeing cases of residents being neglected.

“When we do trays, we go in their rooms, and we can call for somebody for help, and they’ll still be on the floor for like three hours,” Daniels said. “It could be a whole day if it turns out to be.”

“If their light is on, we can call on the walkie and say such and such needs assistance, the light will still be going off two hours later,” Brewer said.

Both said the decision to close didn’t come as a surprise.

“For them to give them 30 days, knowing some of these people don’t have families, they haven’t been in contact with for years, it’s just unfair for the residents,” Brewer said.

Schott said the company is working diligently with HUD to connect residents with other housing options and noted that 22 of the facility’s 30 residents have already found new housing.

He also said that once the facility closes, the company plans to work with the city of Westland to convert the property into more affordable housing.

https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MIEOG/2025/06/23/file_attachments/3301089/LARA%20Draft%20Reproductive%20Health%20Correspondence%20to%20Hospitals%2006.13.2025%20Generic%20to%20State%20Regulations%20062025.pdf

https://michiganadvance.com/2025/06/24/on-dobbs-anniversary-michigan-reminds-hospitals-of-their-reproductive-health-care-responsibilities/

On Dobbs anniversary, Michigan reminds hospitals of their reproductive health care responsibilities
By Jon King - June 24, 2025

An order issued Tuesday by the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs reiterated to Michigan hospitals their responsibilities “to continue providing adequate and appropriate reproductive care to patients.”

The notice came on the three-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and ended nearly 50 years of a constitutional right to an abortion.

It also follows a decision earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to rescind guidance that emphasized hospitals are responsible for providing emergency abortion care despite state bans, saying it does not reflect the Trump administration’s policy.

“Due to recent federal action taken and guidance issued, the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs reminds you that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) remains in force, including its requirement to provide screening and appropriate follow up care,” the notice stated.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office said the decision to rescind the guidance will place thousands of lives at risk by restricting women’s ability to access appropriate emergency health care.

“Here in Michigan, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to make their own decisions about their reproductive health,” Whitmer said in a press release. “We trust women to make decisions that are right for their bodies, lives, and futures. I’ll keep fighting like hell to protect your freedoms.”

The notice makes clear to Michigan hospitals that the state’s authority on reproductive health issues is not preempted by decisions made by the federal government. It also says that while state-licensed health facilities and agencies aren’t required to admit patients for the purpose of performing an abortion, they “are still required to offer adequate and appropriate care for the services they provide.”

In its press release, Whitmer’s office states that by not enforcing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, the Trump administration is “providing cover to hospitals systems that have ideological opposition to abortions, putting the life of the mother at risk in the process.”

Meanwhile, reproductive rights advocates note that in the three years since Roe was overturned, more than 20 states have severely restricted or placed outright bans on access to abortion. Combined with a lack of clarity around the responsibilities of hospitals in those states to provide appropriate care, those advocates say the result has been a number of preventable deaths.

“Knowing this, the Trump administration still revoked Biden-era guidance around lifesaving emergency care, making their stance as clear as ever: when faced with a life or death situation, they do not care if pregnant people die,” Paula Thornton Greear, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, said.

Whitmer also expects that Trump’s decision to rescind the federal guidance will result in additional residents in states like neighboring Indiana that have abortion bans to seek reproductive health care in Michigan. That could place a strain on resources and potentially limit the services offered by Michigan hospitals, Whitmer said.

Mackinac Center's 3-member panel gives cogent reasons for reform, and citing three recent presidents and Governor Whitmer, among others.

Refreshingly, it calls for legislative skepticism of special interest experts.

This 1-hour video of the recent symposium is well worth your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzXQdjm-Txo&t=1s

1. Implementing the best of LARA’s recommendations to streamline the state’s licensing
process while cutting out unnecessary barriers. Roughly 75% of the Department’s
recommendations are good policy and reduce red tape. Those are the recommendations
the Rules Committee will pursue. Some recommendations were not included due to
differences in policy preference, stakeholder feedback, and recommendations that
created additional red tape.

2. Review and adjust Michigan’s licensing regime to get the government out of the way of
pursuing a licensed profession in Michigan.

3. Implement meaningful reforms of Michigan’s regulatory and permitting system to make
Michigan a top state to start a business, a family, and a career.

This initiative follows a February 2025 LARA report which made some fairly innocuous recommendations to cut red tape:

https://dtj5wlj7ond0z.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/06/Rules-Committee-Report-final.pdf

https://www.michigan.gov/lara/-/media/Project/Websites/lara/about/LARA_CuttingRedTapeReport-1.pdf

https://www.wlns.com/capital-rundown/michigan-house-republicans-propose-ways-to-cut-red-tape/

Michigan House republicans propose ways to cut red tape
By Duncan Phenix - June 12, 2025

LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — Michigan House republicans are releasing a report they say shows how to confront “the problem of excessive state regulations, which create barriers and increase costs for skilled workers, small businesses, health care providers, and homebuilders.”

In a news release, they claim, “There is bipartisan agreement that Michigan should cut this unnecessary red tape. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called for streamlining licensing and permitting during her State of the State Address in February.”

On Thursday, a group of republican lawmakers with the House Rules Committee is releasing their Red Tape Reduction Initiative to “lay out a plan for restoring common sense to Michigan`s state government.”

https://www.dbusiness.com/daily-news/michigan-health-council-details-solutions-to-health-care-workforce-challenges/

https://www.mhc.org/workforceplan

https://www.mhc.org/_files/ugd/24abcc_b5f61284ac314223ae01cfcea5e28616.pdf

Michigan Health Council Details Solutions to Health Care Workforce Challenges
The Michigan Health Council (MHC) in Okemos, near Lansing, has released a new plan aimed at guiding the implementation of data-driven solutions to the state’s future health care workforce challenges.
By Tim Keenan - April 30, 2025

As Michigan’s population ages and many health care providers near retirement age, the Michigan Health Council has released a new plan to guide the implementation of data-driven solutions to the state’s future health care workforce challenges. // Stock photo
The Michigan Health Council (MHC) in Okemos, near Lansing, has released a new plan aimed at guiding the implementation of data-driven solutions to the state’s future health care workforce challenges.

Key recommendations of the 2025 Michigan Healthcare Workforce Plan include strengthening existing statewide health care career awareness, exploration, and preparation activities; expanding partnerships between education and health care settings to reduce geographical and other barriers to earning a health care certification or degree; and focusing on understanding health care staffing and retention across the state.

“Michigan stands at a critical crossroads,” says Craig Donahue, president and CEO of MHC. “Our aging population is driving increased health care demand, our current health care workforce is approaching a retirement cliff, and we continue to struggle getting people into the workforce pipeline.

“The time for decisive action is now to ensure quality healthcare remains accessible for all Michiganders. We see the Workforce Plan as an opportunity to engage stakeholders in the work of implementing solutions.”

Supported by the Michigan Health Endowment Fund, the Workforce Plan is built on a framework consisting of four key pillars:

Grow Interest in Health Care Careers – Expanding career readiness opportunities for students through enhanced K-12 career development, increased job shadowing and observation experiences, and targeted student engagement programs.

Improve Access to Health Care Education – Removing barriers to healthcare education by expanding collaborative programs, increasing the availability of healthcare apprenticeships, and improving transfer pathways to make healthcare education more accessible and affordable.

Increase Experiential Education Capacity – Addressing the shortage of clinical placement sites and educators by expanding the use of alternative training sites, supporting and incentivizing clinical faculty and preceptors, and collecting data to better understand and utilize clinical capacity.

Explore Recruitment and Retention Strategies – Encouraging partnerships that build local talent pipelines, improving access to career development opportunities for all healthcare workers, and better understanding turnover using data.

“The health of Michigan residents is intrinsically linked to the state of our health workforce. That is why this report is important,” says Kari Sederburg, vice president for programs and director for healthy aging at the Michigan Health Endowment Fund.

“By providing training pathways, recruitment, and retention recommendations, the report speaks to workers’ needs throughout their careers. Helping our health professionals thrive requires a shared vision and aligned actions to meet our communities’ health needs today and tomorrow.”

Officials say the Workforce Plan has been informed by data analysis and research, including the Michigan Healthcare Workforce Index, a first-of-its-kind product of MHC that assessed the health of 36 health care occupations in Michigan based on four inputs — wages, growth, shortages, and turnover–to determine how each occupation is faring in our economy.

“The next step is critical,” Donahue says. “This plan comes to life when stakeholders engage with each of the Workforce Plan’s proposals, putting into motion actionable solutions critical to the future health of Michiganders.”