Let’s think for a minute about Aurelia Pucinski, clerk of the Circuit Court and rookie Republican.
The Republicans made her their candidate for Cook County Board president, but things could be going a little more smoothly with her new friends.
Herb Schumann, then Cook County Republican chairman, helped convince her to leave the Democrats. He was dumped shortly after her arrival by some party bosses who weren’t impressed with the move.
Don Stephens, the mayor of Rosemont, a big Republican player and one of the people who ousted Schumann, has given money to the campaign of Pucinski’s Democratic opponent, board President John Stroger. And if Stroger hasn’t quite locked up Stephens’ undying gratitude, he’s in position to do so. All Stroger has to do is roll over a group of Republicans who want to stop Stephens from taking control of a couple of acres of county forest in Rosemont.
Her old friends in the Democratic Party, well, they’re none too happy that she embarrassed them by leaving the party. And they just helped Stroger to a smashing win in the Democratic primary.
Stroger, meanwhile, has just announced a property tax cut. Never mind it’s so small that average homeowners will barely save enough for a round of Happy Meals at McDonald’s. A tax cut is a tax cut and it will look good in Stroger’s commercials.
So there you are, Aurelia Pucinski, daughter of the Northwest Side and newest member of a party that has long considered Chicago to be a foreign capital. How are you going to beat John Stroger?
She knows the answer to that. She has to brush aside the party infighting, she has to lean on her benefactor, former Gov. Jim Thompson, to raise $2 million.
And she has to make John Stroger’s move to build a $1 billion Cook County Hospital the No. 1 issue of the race. It won’t be enough to say the hospital is a bad idea. She will have to vow to kill it. And that’s exactly what she intends to do.
Since the County Board has approved a construction contract and Stroger & Co. got out the gold shovels a few weeks ago and broke ground, the debate would seem to be over. Well, not so fast.
“I do not think that it is a done deal,” Pucinski told me in an interview. I plan to do everything I can to stop it.
“I think there are escape clauses in the contract. Now, they have a long time to rewrite contracts and ordinances and all sorts of goofy shenanigans, but I believe as the contracts are currently written and scheduled, that it is not a done deal, yet. Assuming that they haven’t got the whole 464 beds built by the time the next County Board president takes over.”
No, construction isn’t supposed to be completed until 2002. As far as escape clauses, well, that’s anybody’s guess. Pucinski says she has asked to see the specifications, but even though she is a county official, she has been told to file a Freedom of Information request and be ready to pay for copies of thousands of pages of documents. She’s willing to do that. “I’m anxiously awaiting getting my hands on this stuff,” she says.
Of course, saying that she will stop the hospital is only half an answer. Republicans have been complaining for years about the cost of a new hospital, but haven’t sold anyone on a specific, credible alternative.
That’s the real job for Pucinski.
She is developing an alternative. It will rely on neighborhood clinics and contracts with existing hospitals. It will look to the University of Illinois Hospital to take over the trauma services provided by Cook County Hospital.
That’s the outline of a smart plan. Cook County is building a big new hospital when there are private hospitals all over the county that have empty beds every day.
The people who want to build the $1 billion hospital say that if the government closed Cook County Hospital and made a deal, instead, with the private hospitals to care for county patients, the county would get soaked. The privates already care for a number of poor people and assume the cost of that. If the hospitals have a contract with the county, though, they’ll bill the county for every poor patient who comes in the door.
The answer, as Pucinski notes, is to require the private hospitals to show their track record of taking poor patients at their own expense, and maintain that. If they bill the county for those patients, they lose their contract and look–for all the world to see–like scam artists.
“Private hospitals have a level of responsibility for charity work. It’s in their budgets,” Pucinski says. “You structure your agreement so they’re not conning you into taking an unfair share of that.”
The final step is to explain why the alternative, closing the public hospital and directing the poor to private hospitals, is kinder and gentler. That has tripped up Republican opponents, who always appear to be more interested in dollars than people. Pucinski, however, has better political instincts than the run-of-the-mill Republican.
Why, she says, is it fair to herd poor people into one place?
“If I lived in Worth Township and my kid broke his leg, I would not want somebody to tell me I had to go to County Hospital. Why should we treat poor people worse than we treat anybody else?
“The real anti-poor idea is to have one central location that you force everyone to go to,” she says. “A billion dollars worth of bricks and mortar is not going to get any better service by itself. You will spend all that money on that hospital, and not taken out one appendix. The question is whether we can provide good, comprehensive, convenient medical care in the neighborhood. You can’t do that by providing one central hospital.”
Aurelia Pucinski might have cause to harbor some misgivings about her new friends in the GOP. Her best friend in November, though, could turn out to be Cook County’s $1 billion folly.
