Miami-Dade commissioners show growing concern over Jackson Health System
Miami-Dade commissioners show growing concern over Jackson Health System
BY JOHN DORSCHNER
Before a long day ended with the Miami-Dade County Commission rejecting a plan for the county mayor to appoint a new board for Jackson Health System, commissioners spent hours Wednesday venting and asking questions that revealed the politicians' growing concerns about the public institution's desperate finances.
Perhaps one of the broadest sweeps came from Commissioner Barbara Jordan, a government administrator for two decades and a county commissioner for six years.
``It's important to remember we are part of the problem,'' she said, recalling a time some years ago when the county was struggling financially and Jackson was flush with money. The county transferred to Jackson the burdens for primary care clinics, two public nursing homes and medical treatment of county jail inmates.
``We transferred the services to Jackson without transferring the dollars,'' Jordan said.
Eneida Roldan, Jackson's chief executive, said that transfer is now costing Jackson $106 million, plus the expenses for in-patient inmate care that the system hasn't calculated yet. That's a large part of the $229 million that Jackson is projected to lose this year unless drastic cuts are made.
Several times throughout the day, commissioners and Jackson executives stated that the previous chief executive, Marvin O'Quinn, who left in December 2008, had warned the county that Jackson's present model serving high numbers of uninsured was unsustainable. Few in county government took the notion seriously until the present crisis escalated in the past several weeks.
Shifting from the large overview to details, Jordan demanded information on why Jackson was paying an outside firm more than $5 million to process Medicaid and disability applications when an in-house staff could have done the work without additional cost.
Jordan said she had heard that patients with names starting A through M were processed in house and N-Z were given to the outside company. She said she wanted to know what were the success rates of the two applicant groups. A Jackson executive said she'd get back to the commissioner with the numbers.
Several commissioners said they had direct experience with Jackson's inefficiencies. Both Sally Heyman and Joe Martinez said they personally knew patients who had been treated at Jackson and their insurance companies had never been billed. Jordan said she knew ``a couple of people'' who came from Broward to get their medications at Jackson, which is subsidized by Miami-Dade taxpayers.
Several commissioners said they had been demanding specific information from Jackson for weeks and hadn't received answers. Heyman has a list of requests, some of them more than a month old, that Jackson has yet to give her information on.
Miami Herald staff writer Matthew Haggman contributed to this article.