If all goes as planned on Wednesday, there will be a new panel of overseers in charge of the disastrously mismanaged Cook County public health system. All eyes will rest on its 11 members, while the Cook County Board and its president, Todd Stroger, supposedly slink into the background, foisting all questions and political heat on the newbies.
Hey, the county pols will say, it’s all up to the health panel now. You got a problem with patronage? Talk to them. Insider contracts? Not us. Kickback schemes? We wouldn’t know about that. A health delivery system so inefficient that it doesn’t even attempt to bill some patients? Their problem, not ours.
What should the rest of us think about this alleged transfer of power to a new health panel? Has the Cook County Board really taken the steps that will fix the health system to benefit patients who rely on it and taxpayers who support it? Or have the pols merely hauled in the fog machine? Are they just trying to avoid being held responsible for their years of dereliction?
We have our suspicions. If the board doesn’t take bold steps, it will be clear that the creation of this health panel was just a County Board effort to deflect blame.
The panel members need to wade into this $800-million-a-year mess and cut out the patronage for which it’s notorious.
They need to fix lagging collections of insurance billings.
They need to improve information technology so they can get a better snapshot of the system as a whole.
And they need to right-size a system whose three hospitals support too many empty beds. That means asking what until now has been a politically forbidden question: Should one or two of the three county hospitals be closed, with those resources shifted to beefing up clinics in the neighborhoods?
Unfortunately, the prospects for these sorts of dramatic changes are not promising:
– Stroger named the health panel members, including too many Democratic insiders and labor reps of the go-along-to-get-along school. There are some good members on this panel, but Stroger can ask the County Board to dump any of them who act more independently than he likes.
– The system has a money problem that has managed to grow even worse, with patient revenues for the first quarter of this year running below even scaled-back estimates. The Cook County Board is still writing the checks. Which means there’s still plenty of room for budgetary meddling in the health system.
– Efforts by state Sen. Jeff Schoenberg (D-Evanston) to force a management audit of Stroger Hospital — to lay the groundwork for real change — recently failed in the General Assembly.
– The ordinance that created the health panel leaves plenty of room for Stroger & Co. to control it from arm’s length. Stroger and the County Board can review all operations of the panel at any time for any reason, points out Dr. Richard Benya, chairman of the health and life sciences committee of the Union League Club.
There will be, we’re sure, some lofty words on Wednesday about a new day for the beleaguered health system.
We hope those words prove accurate. That will require more moxie from members of this health panel than many of the County Board members expect or want.
