Cook County may seek to impose a fee on all charitable institutions to pay for the County’s incompetence.
Running a government isn’t a tough thing to do. You collect taxes and fees and spend what you bring in. All of it presumes you are wisely spending the tax money you are getting. At present, we are watching the wasteful Democratic administrations in the City of Chicago, County of Cook and State of Illinois struggling to find ways to pay for their institutional waste; including wildly inefficient, incompetent and ineffective workers’’ comp defense programs. Now it would appear they are attacking hospitals to try to make up their deficits.
Last week, the Chicago Sun-Times reported four hospital CEOs from South Suburban, Ingalls Memorial, St. James and Little Company of Mary Hospitals voiced their opposition to a proposed Cook County tax seeking to charge all hospitals in the county a fee if they fail to meet county-mandated criteria for charity care – the equivalent of 4.5 percent of their annual expenses. Few Cook County taxpayers want to steer more money to a county government that recently dished $14,000 to a sheriff’s employee who claimed a back injury twice after reaching to pick up a piece of toilet paper. In 2008, the county paid a whopping $69 million in litigation-related expenses, according to a report.
Because the majority of hospitals are exempt from paying property and income taxes and certain state and local sales taxes, they are expected to provide a commensurate level of free care to indigent patients. Although there’s no question hospitals are providing millions of dollars in free care every year, some of the larger ones that can absorb low-income patients are not meeting the burden as much as they should, claim county officials. And the same officials claim larger, wealthier hospitals are dumping uninsured patients on the already cash-strapped Stroger, Provident and Oak Forest hospitals that are run by the county.
The Hospital CEO’s say the last thing Cook County government needs is a new revenue stream when it can’t control its budget now. Costs are out of control. Represented by the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, the hospitals oppose the new proposed fee. The four CEOs said they also oppose such fees on their larger health-care counterparts because eventually smaller providers would be hit, too. Hardest hit under this proposal would be the Advocate Health Care Network, which provided in 2008 the equivalent of only 1.4 percent of annual expenses toward charity care – even with half of its bad debt included in the charity care figures.
If enacted, the tax could cost as much as $350 million annually for hospitals in Cook County, according to the hospital group. And the last thing Cook County needs is more revenue, it said. Travis Akin, executive director of Illinois Lawsuit Abuse Watch, compiled a report showing the rising litigation-related expenses in Cook County, which are 738 times higher than in DuPage County, even though Cook has six times as many people as DuPage.
The Cook County Board’s workers’ compensation committee chairwoman Elizabeth Doody Gorman claims her hands are tied by state laws. We respond to say balderdash. As we have outlined, Cook County doesn’t do any of the things other companies do to cut costs, like hand-written or tape-recorded accident reports and surveillance to catch its employees when they are abusing the system. The City of Chicago refuses to implement light work to make their employees return to work from injuries as soon as possible and get off the dole. Workers’ comp vendors at the Illinois state, county and city level are not competitively and fairly chosen to provide value—you still get the job when someone’s cousin’s brother’s uncle says you do. All three governmental bodies are regularly hit by the IWCC with penalties and attorney’s fees for mismanagement and litigating issues they can’t and shouldn’t fight. The politicians and administrators continue to randomly pick a “whipping boy” as they seek more reasons to justify throwing away taxpayer money.
Well, the Illinois state-wide primaries are a month away, folks. The general election is this fall. Please don’t hesitate to respond with your thoughts and comments.
