TUCSON - It
may be a new century, but the Pima County Board of Supervisors Tuesday
will be still be dealing with the same red ink that stained Kino Community
Hospital in the previous one.
“We’re going
to have to deal with it some way,” Supervisor Raul Grijalva said yesterday.
What has to
be dealt with is the $40 million debt that Kino has rung up over recent
years, most of it coming from uncollected bills and generous contracts
for physicians and other service providers, according to a recent report
by an outside auditing firm.
That audit,
done by PriceWaterhousecoopers for $210,000, noted that the hospital paid
out $7.2 million in such contracts, and got back just over $5 million for
those costs.
On Tuesday,
the board will be asked to approve another contract for the auditing company
of $920,000 to continue working on Kino’s problems. Much of the new duties
of the outside auditor would be to examine ways for the hospital to collect
what for years have been accounts simply written off with little or no
effort to get money for services provided.
Kino is the
public health care hospital for the county. Many patients are either indigent
or on federal or state plans.
Even Grijalva,
a strong supporter of a solvent, politically independent Kino Hospital,
said that contract may face insurmountable opposition Tuesday.
“It may not
go,” Grijalva, a Democrat of District 5, said.
It won’t go,
according to Republican Ray Carroll of District 4.
“Enough is
enough with consultants,” Carroll said yesterday.
Carroll, who
initially supported transferring administrative control of Kino and the
rest of the county’s health care system to a quasi-autonomous Pima Health
Care System Commission, said yesterday that he was ready to support putting
that control back to County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, under
the direction of the supervisors.
“That is one
vote I really regret,” Carroll said of his past support for commission
oversight of the county’s health care system.
That was done,
ostensibly, to remove the hospital from the political influence of individual
members of the Board of Supervisors.
Carroll said
he would vote against the commission’s call for the $920,000 contract extension
for PriceWaterhousecoopers, especially because the board had been provided
no background materials for the request with its agenda material.
“The bottom
line is that there is no cause for this to be on the agenda at this time,”
Carroll said.
The board earlier
this month voted to allow the hospital to spend $1.3 million to shore up
its bill collecting operations. But the board didn’t specify where in the
county budget that money should come from, something that could render
the action illegal, according to County Deputy Civil Attorney Peter Pearman.
That prompted
Huckelberry to fire back a memorandum to Pearman stating that he had found
the source for the $1.3 million in the County’s Attorney’s anti-racketeering
funding that comes from confiscated property under federal law.
The commission
is not to meet until Monday to approve the contract recommendation, meaning
that board members likely won’t see the contract proposal until they convene
for Tuesday morning’s meeting.
Since the consultant’s
report, some doctors have resigned at the hospital, contending that administrators
have resorted to hostility against the workforce to achieve cost-savings.
The board on
Tuesday will consider making Karen Fields interim CEO of the health care
system. Fields was recommended for the post in July by the commission,
but the board has yet to act on the recommendation.
The meeting
is to start at 9 a.m. and be held in the Superior Courts Building, 110
W. Congress.