Joanne Brown detailed to review GMH operations

Hospital officials are pleading with senators for an alternate revenue source, now that they've repealed the general sales tax. Administrators held a news conference Tuesday to air concerns over the loss of critically-needed funding. 

The hospital was counting on the sales tax proceeds to make up for a chronic budget shortfall, currently pegged at $30 million a year. Administrator and CEO Peter John Camacho is challenging lawmakers then to find another way, saying, "If there's an alternative that you folks can come up with, because you folks are the policymakers, we elected you to be our leaders, to make those policy decisions for us. And so it's in their court to come up with something."

Armed with press clippings and copies of audit and inspection reports from years past detailing the hospital's financial woes, CFO Benita Manglona says there's no real solution without a dedicated permanent subsidy, noting, "When you are being reimbursed on average $0.50 on the dollar in what you bill and what you receive, I don't see how even a genius can make a business work with that kind of model. And that's how GMH has been."

Manglona says the hospital has proposed changing its business model to a more typical 50/50 ratio of higher paying outpatient services, but that's not currently in the works. Meantime, several vendors, who are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, were also on hand if only to confirm the hospital's history of slow pay.

One of the governor's most recent moves to address the crisis was to appoint Port GM Joanne Brown to review operations. Manglona says maybe the former lawmaker can help smooth over the often contentious meetings at the Congress Building. "You know a fresh set of eyes? Sure. She can articulate our needs better than maybe me and Peter John can," said Manglona. "She's been at the legislature and they don't move her around. I mean, they don't shut her up. They have stopped me from speaking, clarifying points. But they don't do that to her because she was one of them before."

The hospital is also facing an October 3 deadline to respond to deficiencies identified by a center for Medicare and Medicaid inspection. Management is confident GMH will be allowed to stay in the critical programs.

They point to past inspections such as 2011 with more than a hundred deficiencies, compared to this year's less than 50.