There are two ways to deal with your credit cards. One is fun, the other keeps you out of trouble.
The fun way is to say, I owe $10,000 to Visa, and I’m going to be paying interest on it for the rest of my life. But those nice people gave me a credit limit of $40,000. Let’s go buy some stuff!
This keeps the debt collectors and bankruptcy courts in business.
The practical way is to cut the card in half until you don’t owe. That’s practical, but no fun.
While you were at the beach last month, Cook County Board President John Stroger decided to have fun with your credit cards. He decided to charge $551 million to buy you a new hospital you don’t need.
It’s not like Stroger is sitting on a wad of cash. He has a big financial problem. The county is going to have a $560 million deficit within three years because it went on a spending spree for new prisons and jail guards and the like.
Nobody has complained much because everybody thinks new prisons make them safer. But they’re expensive. So the county is going to be in the red.
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This might make you think that Stroger and County Board members are doing nothing these days but scratching their heads to figure out how to avoid a $560 million deficit. No way! They’ve been figuring out how to spend more money.
The board voted in August to get bids to build a new Cook County Hospital. Board members figure this hospital will cost $551 million to build, but that’s not the real cost. By the time they (read: you) pay the interest on that, the hospital will cost more than $1 billion.
They can do this because somebody will always lend money to the county as long as the county has a few million taxpayers available to pay it off.
Stroger and company are hankering to build a new Cook County Hospital at the same time that the old Cook County Hospital is emptying out faster than the White Sox payroll.
Six years ago, county hospital had an average 655 patients a day. Now it averages 421 patients a day, and the number has dropped more than 10 percent just in the last year. Provident Hospital, which the county spent $60 million to renovate a few years ago, has only about 70 patients a day.
Fewer people are going to public hospitals. Insurance companies are keeping people out of hospitals and sending them home faster when they do go in, so private hospitals have loads of empty beds. They’ve become more willing to fill those beds with patients on Medicaid, who used to go to public hospitals because nobody else wanted them. That has left the public hospitals with the patients who aren’t covered by private insurers or the government.
Around the country, hospitals have been closing and public hospitals have been struggling to hang onto their patients.
But here, the great rush to build the grand new hospital nobody needs has been humming along fairly quietly, except for the wailing of a few Republicans on the County Board.
Those Republicans ask a good question: If there are hundreds of empty hospital beds around town, why can’t we use them for the county’s dwindling number of patients? The answer is, they could. The county recently cut a deal with Bethany Hospital and St. Anthony Hospital to take pregnant women who otherwise would deliver at County Hospital. It’s exactly the kind of deal the county ought to be making for other types of patients.
But Stroger and company are hell-bent on borrowing money for bricks and mortar because politicians love monuments to themselves. The last County Board president, Dick Phelan, kicked off this crusade to build a hospital, but didn’t stick around long enough to see it. Now it will be Stroger’s monument, big and expensive and gasping for patients. He wants to break ground early next year.
Nobody’s doing much to stop it. The Democrats know they’ve got a money problem in county government, and they’re not very confident that Stroger is up to fixing it. Stroger is one of the nicer guys in politics, but he doesn’t like to make difficult decisions. For all his somber warnings about the county’s big deficit, Stroger really hasn’t done much except keep the fires burning for a big new hospital.
Stroger has to run for re-election in 1998, and his performance so far ought to make him ripe for a Democrat to take him on. There is talk about Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan or county Commissioner Cal Sutker running. If Stroger gets a pass it will be for two reasons: Money and the mayor.
Stroger has enough campaign cash to scare off challengers, and Mayor Richard Daley is ready to smite anybody who might take on Stroger in a Democratic primary.
That’s Mayor Daley, who has a national reputation for being the great urban innovator, protecting the guy who’s running up the credit card bills over at the county.
This billion-dollar hospital ought to have all the makings of a tax revolt, but tax revolts only happen when big tax bills hit. This one hasn’t hit yet.
Stroger got caught in a tax revolt late last year when he tried to go for a 1,400-percent increase in the tax that is paid when real estate is sold. Angry taxpayers jammed the county’s phone lines, and Stroger dropped the idea.
Stroger learned his lesson. Spending money you don’t have is always way more fun.