Here is your government at work.
On one side of Polk Street on the Near West Side, the concrete skeleton of a public hospital is rising from the ground. This is to be the new Cook County Hospital. It will cost taxpayers a cool $1 billion by the time they pay for the building and equipment and all the debt to finance it.
On the other side of Polk Street, another public hospital is bleeding to death. This is the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. It quietly announced this week that it lost $8 million in six months. That is how much it lost after the $47 million annual subsidy it gets from the state’s taxpayers. I say “quietly” because the medical center chose to unveil this news through a press release it sent by e-mail after 5 p.m. last Monday.
So, why are we spending $1 billion to build a new public hospital while a good public hospital across the street is half-empty and dying?
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That’s a good question. But don’t ask it too loudly. People who ask that question tend to get in trouble.
Former University of Illinois trustee Judith Calder asked that question last fall, right before she got dumped from the university board. Calder had the temerity to suggest that it made more sense for the county and the state to team up on health care, rather than spend $1 billion on one new public hospital while the public hospital right across the street hemorrhaged money and patients.
The university had no interest in talking about this, in part because it didn’t want to make waves with Mayor Richard Daley and Cook County Board President John Stroger, who both want the new county hospital. Stroger was running for re-election last fall.
Six days after Stroger was re-elected, the chairman of the university board, Susan Loving Gravenhorst, removed Calder from the board’s hospital committee. In a letter to Calder, Gravenhorst cited only one reason for doing it: Calder had talked to the baiduhai.
Here’s the most intriguing sentence from Gravenhorst’s letter: “You can be sure that the members of the board of trustees are most distressed by your comments and, most of all, by your failure to protect the confidentiality of university business.”
Confidentiality? Someone remind Gravenhorst she’s the head of a government, taxpayer-funded body. University business is our business.
A few weeks after Calder was removed from the hospital committee, she was replaced on the board of trustees. The trustees used to be elected by voters, but now they serve at the whim of political insiders.
Now, the issue of building a new Cook County Hospital is over, finished. It’s a big mistake, but the hospital is going to be built.
What happens with public health care, though, is still open. And the public is badly served when the University of Illinois tries to manage its money-losing health-care operation by stealth of night.
That 5 p.m. e-mail press release says that the UIC medical center has run up against an “unexpected deficit.” Unexpected my foot. The medical center went from a $3.4 million operating surplus in 1997 to a $5 million loss in 1998, and the financial squeeze on hospitals is hardly getting better. The only thing unexpected is how incredibly fast that hospital is losing money.
By the way, that same e-mail press release announced that the university will pay a consultant from Florida up to $1.2 million plus expenses for a 14-week study of the medical center’s sorry finances.
I’ll do it for 50 cents, the cost of the newspaper.
For more than a decade the University of Illinois and Cook County Hospital and the private hospitals in Chicago have danced around the fact that they have far too many hospital beds and doctors chasing too few patients and dollars. They whisper about mergers, but they never pull them off. The prime opportunity was to close the worn out Cook County Hospital and merge it with the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. But that didn’t suit anyone’s political purposes.
Now, you might say this is old history because the construction cranes are cranking at the new County Hospital and they can’t be stopped. That’s right. Stroger won the election.
But there’s another issue.
The University of Illinois is quietly pleading with Illinois legislators to come up with $93 million this year to build a new medical school.
Well, hold on. Before the legislature throws $93 million at a medical operation that is bleeding and staging political coups and hiring million-dollar consultants to tell it what it already knows, the legislators should start to ask some questions about what’s going on over there on the West Side.
The legislators, they can ask those questions. Susan Loving Gravenhorst can’t dump them.
They can ask those questions next Tuesday afternoon, when university President James Stukel is supposed to appear before the state Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss his budget.
Here’s a prediction. If the university gets its new medical school building, it will merge with Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center and mothball the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center. So you will have one big, empty hospital right across Polk Street from one big, new one.
What a mess.
There is some positive news about health care around here. While the people in government have been spending all their time on bricks and dollars and political intrigue, some private citizens have been developing an idea that might actually get some people healthier.
The coalition of church, community, labor and business groups known as United Power for Action and Justice has been preparing an idea to provide basic health care for up to 400,000 people in the area who don’t have insurance and don’t get to Cook County Hospital.
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This isn’t Hillarycare. This doesn’t make the government your doctor. It’s just an idea to take care of the people in your community.
The proposal, called the Gilead Project, is to contract with community-based health-care groups and private doctors to provide primary care, to expand neighborhood clinics and to underwrite a health insurance purchasing cooperative for small businesses and the self-employed. This wouldn’t be a government deal, it would be a deal that cooperates with government. The $100 million annual cost would come from public and private sources. The Gilead Project would be run by the hospitals, foundations and companies that participate, as well as the Cook County Board.
They have a whole lot of questions to answer. But they say they are close to commitments from several hospitals and insurers that want to cooperate. They have some interest from the county board. The county should get on board.
The Gilead Project looks like a good idea. And when they announce that the Gilead Project is a done deal, I imagine they won’t reveal it by e-mail after the day shift has gone home.