At the April 26th Mendocino Coast District Hospital (MCDH) Board of Directors meeting, the District's legal counsel was directed to draft a resolution that would remove Dr. Lucas Campos from his seat on the board. Campos has missed many board and Finance Committee meetings dating back to 2017. In addition questions have been raised about the precise whereabouts of his legal residence. There are several on record, from a seldom used apartment in Fort Bragg to San Francisco to a Chico medical business to a Santa Rosa location listed with the state medical board. Campos appears to have already lost his seat as chair of the hospital's finance committee. Dr. Peter Glusker has chaired recent meetings and will continue to do so. Dr. Kevin Miller will fill the finance vacancy created by Campos' vacancy.
If Campos is removed from his seat on the board before the end of June then the remaining members will ask those interested in the position to apply and be interviewed. The four other board members will then select a person to serve until the November election. Of course, that person is free to run for the seat. If the June deadline is not met then the person appointed by the board serves the rest of Campos' term until the November, 2020 election.
A timely removal of Campos would set the stage for four of the five seats on the MCDH Board to be up for grabs in the November, 2018 election. Only Board President Steve Lund will have remaining time left on his term (two more years). Board members Peter Glusker and Kitty Bruning have expressed their desire to step down after completing their four year terms. Both were elected for the first time in November, 2014. Dr. Kevin Miller has not yet made clear whether or not he will seek re-election.
The MCDH Board also announced that in closed session they had agreed to extend Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bob Edwards' contract through April of 2022. There's some mixed messaging going on here. The language attached to Measure C, which would add $144 per year per parcel to your tax bill, contains the statement that the healthcare district “will not use any of said proceeds for administrator's salaries, benefits or pensions.”
The clear message at the time the parcel tax measure was authored referred to the negative public view of the hospital's top two administrators since 2015: CEO Edwards and now former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Wade Sturgeon, who served from September, 2015 to November, 2017, when he was allowed to resign. It is hard to believe that the closed session vote to extend Edwards' contract into 2022 was a unanimous one. It would be reasonable to guess that Dr. Glusker opposed it, leaving Board President Lund and members Bruning and Miller as the culprits.
During the April 26th meeting, Edwards went out of his way to criticize former interim CFO John Parigi. Edwards opened the castigation of Parigi's brief three month tenure by claiming that Parigi was not even an “interim” CFO. According to Edwards Parigi was merely a consultant. Later in the CEO's rant he stated that Parigi had caused under staffing in the Finance Department by firing the revenue cycle director. The problematic inherent contradiction: consultants at MCDH don't have firing power; however, Bob Edwards wants to have it both ways, Mr. Parigi wasn't the interim CFO, just a consultant, but a lowly consultant who fired the revenue cycle director. Mr. Edwards lives in an alternate reality in which he'd be perfectly suited for national political office.
A further contradiction to Edwards' initial statement that John Parigi wasn't the interim CFO at the hospital can be seen in the board agenda for the meeting at which Mr. Parigi was interviewed. The job was identified as “Interim CFO.” Here's a reminder, the board agendas at MCDH are the product of the Board President and the CEO (Edwards). In other words Bob Edwards doesn't tell the truth. He contradicts himself from one bogus point to the next.
Edwards made some other claims regarding things Mr. Parigi said regarding negotiations with Meditec, the potential provider of a unified electronic health record system, and a finance company. At best, Edwards' allegations regarding Parigi on these matters may boil down to a he said/he said situation. As of press time this writer was attempting to make contact with those involved to nail down just which “he said” is accurate.
Readers judging Edwards casting stones at others may want to recall that Edwards is the CEO who has had multiple workplace harassment complaints made against him. He has directly fired or forced out numerous hospital employees, especially at or near the manager level. At least one manager left MCDH on stress leave two or three times, returning in between, before deciding to take a similar job elsewhere.
When Edwards is not just out and out making things up, he is prone to gross exaggeration. In his “CEO Report” at the April 26th meeting, he extolled the improvements in “patient experience” at MCDH and stated that the hospital had advanced from a two star rating to three stars.
It is true that a recent Medicare study, under the heading “Hospital Compare,” did give the local hospital three stars. What he didn't tell that evening's audience, or the public in general, is that the same study gives Howard Hospital, in Willits, thirty-one miles away, four out of a possible five stars. Santa Rosa Memorial also achieved a four star rating. That same government study gives patient ratings in eleven different categories. In all eleven categories Howard Hospital had a higher rating than MCDH. In all but one of the eleven categories, MCDH scored below the national average.
The Board President at MCDH, Steve Lund, goes right along with Edwards and his prevarications, as do fellow board members Bruning and Miller. Edwards claimed he had been advocating for a unified electronic health record (EHR) system since he first arrived at MCDH in the spring of 2015. The record does not support such a claim. The inability to grasp what was wrong in regard to coding, billing, and charging failures was a part of the shady financial dealings that former CFO Wade Sturgeon got caught up in, and Edwards condoned, which led to the current federal lawsuit that is hanging over the hospital, Edwards, Lund, and Sturgeon. Those ridiculous financial failures had nothing to do with a three month interim CFO, but listening to Edwards last Thursday, April 26th, one might get the impression that Mr. Parigi was behind everything wrong at the hospital and Edwards was the lone knight fighting for right and justice.
All this, again, leads us to the parcel tax, Measure C, on the June ballot. This CEO and a majority of the hospital's board are asking voters to support a $144 per year tax for an institution that has failed to collect millions of dollars every year in legitimate charges. Now they want you to give them a loan from taxpayers' pockets. This is comparable to someone you know, who owns a business but does not make all the customers pay at the checkout counter, not out of favoritism, but simple neglect in collecting legit charges. Next, imagine that someone asking you for a loan to make up for their losses. Giving such a loan would be very little different than giving an addictive gambler more money in Vegas. MCDH needs to show that it can collect a much higher percentage of their legitimate charges before it asks for any sort of handout from the voters and taxpayers.
Top off that failure to collect millions upon millions every year for many years with a CEO and a board majority with their heads buried so deep in the sands of mutual enabling that they can't see the stark realities staring them in the face.
All the Beatles had to sell you was the word, love. All this feeble crew helming MCDH has to sell voters is fear: Fear that the OB (obstetrics) Department might close (of course, Edwards was the first to publicly back that idea, years before the parcel tax reached the ballot), fear that the emergency room (ER) might close, fear that the hospital itself may shut down. Edwards and Lund are counting on those conscious or subconscious fears to sway you at the ballot box. Fear is the lowest form of propaganda, and what they are selling is lower than the weary hooves on a hobbled horse placed oh so obviously behind a rickety cart. No one with good sense loans their, or their neighbor's, hard earned money to a business that for years has gone out of its way to misplace and lose the money its hard working employees have earned. What you do is demand that the business managers, its leaders, demonstrate that they can actually collect the money their workers have rightfully earned. If that day comes, and miracles do happen, lo and behold, all those missed millions might add up to a sum that shows the business didn't need a loan at all, just some proper management.
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