Children's Hospital Out to Screw Tax Payers (Editorial)

Divorce yourself from what the Children's Hospital does for a moment and look rationally at the actions of the CH board.

They screwed you and they apparently meant to all along.

Months ago the passed a resolution authorizing the pursuit of bankruptcy all the while negotiating with the UMC Board like they were going to have some kind of payment system worked out in the end. The bottom line is, they weren't negotiating in good faith.

When you think about it, why would the CH board even care? They aren't accountable to the tax payers because they are not elected by the people nor are they appointed by a governing body. The UMC board is also not directly accountable to the tax payers. They are appointed by the members of commissioners court, but once they are on the UMC board, they can basically do whatever the hell they want and really can't be removed.

So you have two entities who have zero direct accountability to the people who are playing with a ton of tax payer monopoly money.

And we are shocked by what they did?

The CH doesn't even list UMC as a creditor. They have them listed as someone to go into mediation with. Do you know what that means? It means that they want to pay less than what they owe, thats why they want to go into mediation. No one goes into mediation because they want to pay the full amount. The CH owes the tax payers a big chunk of money and rather than work out a system where they work more closely with UMC, and organization that at least has somewhat more accountability, in order for the tax payers to be made whole again, they want to go into mediation so that they can find a way to pay us less than what they owe us.

Forget all the legalese, that is essentially is what is going on here.

All so that they can stay "independent". Look at how well they are doing acting independently thus far...

Children's Hospital had other options. They are the bad guys here and if you don't understand that you not only haven't been paying attention but you probably don't understand the role of the three bodies involved here.

Now I know the other side of the coin is to say we never should've done this at all, "I knew it was going to fail", etc, etc. Maybe that is true, that really isn't the point. The point is that the CH board had other options and chose the option that screws the tax payers the most. They didn't negotiate in good faith.

However there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to hold them accountable for this course of action.

The peoples' voice in all of this is the County and they have little to almost no say-so in how this is going to play out at this point. This all appears to be in the hands of a judge and two un-elected bodies.

Interestingly the reaction from local elected officials that was outlined in the El Paso Times is actually pretty revealing. The state delegation all made very general statements that really didn't say much. Except State Rep Marquez who broke ranks from all the other elected officials and went so far as to say that CH had "very competent hands".

But the County elected officials, each of them, sounded like they were furious. I think the reason the County elected officials are furious and why they have such a sharper tone than the state delegation is because updates on the CH issue have pretty much been a standing issue in their executive session agenda items for months. So for months they have been getting updates on the situation and based on the tone of their remarks, this move caught everyone by surprise.

Obviously they are pretty angry at Children's. And you should be too.