elpasospeak

Our thanks to one of our readers who sent information about this article in El Diario de El Paso.  You may want to use Google translate if your Spanish isn’t good enough to read it.

According to the article Medicare will penalize our county hospital one percent of their reimbursements next year because of what Medicare has classified as “preventable errors”.  The penalties evidently started three months ago on October 1, 2014 and were for problems that were observed before then.

One cannot help but wonder if our hospital administrator told his board about the medical problems before he got his bonus.

The hospital was found deficient in three different areas including avoidable infections and surgical complications.  With 10 being the worst score that is assigned,  our county hospital received a 10 in all three areas.  If a hospital receives a score of 7 or higher the law requires that the penalties be assessed.

In our case that will evidently amount to about $350,000.

In Denial

The article went on to say (using Google’s translation service) that according to the head of the hospital’s quality control  effort “patients should not be concerned about these scores as only 18 patients from a total of 33, 598 experienced serious medical complications.”  Further from the article “He explained that the figure presented by avoidable errors is less than one percent, making clear that UMC continues to literally committed to providing quality health care.”

Don’t worry.  We know what we are doing.  Those people over at Medicare don’t know how to run a hospital like we do.

I suspect that the hospital’s response will be to point out the tuberculosis problem that another local hospital had last year as if two wrongs make a right.  At least in the TB situation the hospital addressed the problem aggressively and did not tell us that they only hurt a few people.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our thanks to KVIA for this report and to Mr. Collins for pointing it out.

According to the report our hospital administrator will receive over $3 million in deferred compensation if he stays on thru 2016.  The report did not tell us whether that is fiscal year 2016, calendar year 2016, or light year 2016.

That will be in addition to his base pay and any bonuses that he might get.

The report tells us that he will also get a 56% increase to the deferred compensation to pay for his income taxes on the extra pay.  Incredible!

The highest tax rate is currently 39.6%.  He evidently does not believe that the concept of “fair share” applies to him.

With this much money at stake why has he been risking being terminated?

I’m surprised that his contract does not grant him the deferred compensation at the end of every year instead of requiring him to make it to 2016.

Now we have video of him asking to please be allowed to finish his job.  Baloney!  It looks like he  just wants to make it through 2016.

I am afraid that there is more to this story.

We deserve better

Brutus

Recently an email was released by one of our county commissioners that has been the subject of discussion locally.  Our county hospital administrator had written that  “There were no bonuses paid in 2014 and we expect no bonuses through this year”.

The hospital administrator did not use any adjectives to specify the type of year he was referring to.  He did not write of a “light year”, or an “academic year”, or of a “fiscal year”.  Absent the adjective we would read his words to mean the period starting January 1 and ending December 31.

If on Tuesday I say to you that I will not leave town until next week and then I leave on the very next day or Wednesday, you have every right to feel lied to.  Just because I chose to play with words and start my week on Wednesday does not mean that I told the truth.

Unfortunately we have too many public officials that play word games with us instead of telling the truth.

In fact the problem is so widespread that on January 5, 2010 our feral congress passed H.R. 946, the Plain Writing Act of 2010.  Unfortunately the act does not apply here unless you want to go down the path of either the “commerce clause” or some other theory that would make it applicable here.

We deserve better

Brutus