Pima supervisors will tackle Kino contract  again Tuesday

By Garry Duffy
Green Valley News

 
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.

 
News, Sahuarita, Inside Neighbors, Sports, Weather,Business,T.V. Listing, Health,Letters to the Editor,Subscribe, Obituaries, Meetings, Horoscopes, Home