Baltimore’s University of Maryland Medical Center, has evolved into the entity currently at the center of a conflict-of-interest scandal.
Until 1984, Baltimore had two public hospitals, where all of our neighbors in need of health care were welcome and the wallet-ectomy was not the most common procedure.
By the end of 1984 (the year used for the title of George Orwell’s prescient dystopian novel wherein the misuse of language is a key element), University Hospital became the “non-profit” University of Maryland Medical Center and Baltimore City Hospital became the “non-profit” Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital.
Here “non-profit” became an Orwellian term for the enrichment of directors and officers.
Likewise, the pledge of “respect for the individual” by the hospitals’ new directors and officers meant that staff no longer needed public employee protections – or pesky unions that worked for living wages, decent benefits and fair grievance procedures.
Big Bucks, Bad Management?
The case for private-entity superiority is weak: for every Motor Vehicle Administration nightmare, there is a private health insurance horror story.
Privatization does, however, facilitate profits, especially for the elites who control the levers of power and decisionmaking.
Thus, we have the directors and officers of Bayview and the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) who are compensated most handsomely while employees struggle, like Johns Hopkins workers who have said they must depend upon food stamps and Medicaid.
At the “non-profit” UMMS, four top officials were paid more than one million dollars each, according to tax returns for 2015.
Robert A. Chrencik, the hospital president and chief executive officer, received $2.58 million and eleven officers received at least $588,229 per year.
The following year, Chrencik got a raise that brought him $4.27 million in compensation, a one-year increase of 65%. Nice work if you can get it.
At the same times, members of the UMMS board converted their unpaid positions into lucrative contracts for ambulances, fundraising, human resources, banking, bonds, pest control, management consultation, insurance and strategic planning.
In the case of Catherine E. Pugh, who served on the UMMS board while a state senator and then as Baltimore’s mayor, a company she formed received $500,000 from the hospital system for her self-published Healthy Holly children’s books.
Now those same board members and officers have requested a $75 million revenue increase for 2019, citing administrative costs that have soared 88% since 2014.
As a former CEO of a multi-million-dollar nonprofit agency, I know that our directors and donors would have demanded answers from management for these sorts of numbers – the first being: “Can’t we find someone more effective and efficient?”