May
8
Gov. Charlie Crist’s office approached firms about A.G. Holley tuberculosis hospital before privatization vote
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Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Thursday, May 8, 2008.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
LANTANA – Discussions about privatizing the state’s tuberculosis treatment program started weeks before lawmakers changed the state budget to make it mandatory.
Two potential suitors say they received calls from Gov. Charlie Crist’s economic development office about a month ago, asking whether they would be interested in taking over the program, now run by A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana.
One call went to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, a renowned program based in Denver whose president is a former vice president at a medical technology company in Fort Lauderdale.
Another went to Jorge Dominicis, president of GEO Care, a Boca Raton-based company that runs psychiatric hospitals for the state.
Both said they had talked intermittently during the past two years about taking over management of A.G. Holley. Both told Crist’s Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development that they might consider bidding for the work.
A Crist spokesman, however, said Wednesday that the governor’s office did not push for the budget amendment, which came last week on the second-to-last night of the 60-day legislative session.
Crist’s economic development director had no idea how the measure came about, gubernatorial spokesman Sterling Ivey said.
The flurry of activity follows years of inconclusive talks about A.G. Holley, dating to former Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration.
State Rep. Mary Brandenburg, who supports exploring privatization, said the efforts haven’t always been well coordinated.
“I can understand why anyone might think the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” said Brandenburg, D-West Palm Beach, whose district includes Lantana. She and Dominicis informally discussed GEO Care’s interest in the program as recently as last year.
State Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fernandina Beach, who inserted the language into the budget, said last week he had no specific company in mind to take the program private.
Ivey said Dale Brill, director of Crist’s economic development office, approached Brandenburg and other legislators several weeks before the session’s end and mentioned the possibility of privatizing the hospital. The meeting included Bean, head of the House Healthcare Council.
Ivey said Brill didn’t talk to Bean about A.G. Holley in the last week of the session and didn’t ask for the amendment. “He (Brill) said, ‘I have no idea how the language got in there,’” Ivey said.
Bean’s amendment requires the state to find a private company to design, build and run a TB hospital in an unspecified location. It gives the state health department until July 1 to begin that process and calls for a contract that could last 20 years.
The town of Lantana and the Palm Beach County Health Department have long worked with officials in Tallahassee on plans for the property that houses the aging TB hospital east of Interstate 95. But the state seemed to be moving slowly until this spring.
National Jewish’s president and chief executive officer, Dr. Michael Salem, said his talks with the state have been “very preliminary.” He said he would “need a lot more discussion in order to understand what the state would want to do.”
The hospital already has a regional office in Boca Raton for education, outreach and fund raising. In the past three years, 800 patients from Florida have flown to National Jewish in Denver for care.
“If there is some way we could serve the people down there in a significant way, even more than we do now, it’s something that we would consider,” Salem said.
National Jewish, which finished its first hospital building in 1893, has been ranked the top respiratory center in the country by U.S. News and World Report for 10 years. The nonprofit has no hospitals outside Colorado, but has been expanding, hiring many new specialists in the past 18 months, Salem said.
He said he has watched with interest as the Mayo and Cleveland clinics have expanded in Florida while the state has lured branches of The Scripps Research Institute and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research.
Two years ago, under Bush, the state Department of Health asked companies interested in taking over A.G. Holley to submit proposals. GEO Care was the only one to respond, and the state opted not to privatize.
GEO Care runs psychiatric hospitals under contract with the Florida Department of Children and Families, including a program for mentally ill jail inmates in Martin County. It’s a subsidiary of the security company GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut.
As recently as last year, Dominicis said, he talked with Brandenburg about possibly managing A.G. Holley.
“I’ve known Mary a long time,” Dominicis said. “I’m not sure who approached whom.”
Dominicis said he told the governor’s office in a brief conversation last month that he might be interested. But on Wednesday, Dominicis said: “We are not interested.”
He said that after learning details of a state Health Department consultant’s report from 2007 that criticized GEO Care’s first proposal to take over A.G. Holley. The consultant said GEO wasn’t qualified and might not offer any savings.
Dominicis agreed that tuberculosis treatment is a specialized field, but said the report’s findings on costs were “ludicrous.” He said GEO would have worked with the state and would have hired most of the experts working at A.G. Holley, as it has in other hospitals.
Brandenburg would like to see the state do an objective study of what system would best serve TB patients and the public: “It has almost seemed to me that there are a lot of different people going in different directions.”
A.G. Holley timeline
Proposals for treating the tuberculosis patients committed to A.G. Holley State Hospital have changed over the years:
December 2004: A state advisory council begins meeting to decide the future of the A.G. Holley campus in Lantana.
January 2006: Plans for a medical research center on the site, almost complete, include a new 50-bed hospital that the state Department of Health would run.
July 2006: Under Gov. Jeb Bush, the state Health Department asks companies to submit proposals to privatize the hospital. Only GEO Care responds.
2007: Health Department consultants recommend against privatization.
Spring 2008: An economic development adviser to Gov. Charlie Crist contacts executives at GEO Care and Denver-based National Jewish Medical and Research Center, asking whether they might be interested in managing the hospital. Separately, state Rep. Aaron Bean, chairman of the House Healthcare Council, calls for cutting the hospital’s $11 million budget in half, closing it and requiring the state to look for private bidders to take the patients.
April 27, 2008: House and Senate leaders agree on a budget that includes full funding and would keep the hospital open.
May 1, 2008: On the next-to-last day of the legislative session, Bean inserts an amendment to the budget that requires the state to seek private bidders to design, build and operate a new TB hospital. The location of the new hospital is not specified.
Copyright 2008 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 8, 2008 Thursday
FINAL EDITION
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