Lay blame for JPS where it belongs

Let's put the blame for our county hospital system where it belongs.

The most recent boss was hired in 2001 with a former Euless mayor casting the tie-breaking vote. The votes to hire that candidate -- even though he had no public hospital experience -- came from trustees appointed by suburban Republicans on the Tarrant County Commissioners Court.

All four votes against hiring David Cecero, an out-of-work private hospital administrator from Illinois, came from Fort Worth trustees.

One, the late attorney and former board Vice Chairman Morton Minton, predicted that Cecero would run into problems with public oversight and accountability.

Still, appointees from Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County got their private-sector candidate by a 5-4 vote.

We must blame County Judge Glen Whitley of Hurst and the four commissioners -- including two more votes from the county's northern edge -- for the failures of a hospital system that now seems both uncaring to patients and unaccountable to taxpayers countywide.

There is nobody else we can blame.

We don't get to elect our own hospital trustees.

We have to trust the choices of the Commissioners Court.

In turn, we expect commissioners to choose leaders who will watch our money wisely and run a sound hospital system, the way Parkland Health & Hospital System runs a reliable network in Dallas.

Instead, Cecero and the JPS Health Network trustees have watched public money flow into their savings account while frustrated doctors and patients flow out the door.

A 34-year surgeon retired this week. We had quoted him as saying that Cecero and system officials were "not that interested in patient care" and routinely denied or discouraged low-cost care for the needy, instead making more time and space to favor insured and paying customers.

"That is absolutely contrary to what the surgeons think is the true mission that was set up originally by Mr. John Peter Smith," Dr. Chuck Webber said, invoking the name of the six-term former Fort Worth mayor who donated 5 acres in 1877 for a future hospital "for the poor of the city and county."

It would be the 1930s before the city and county governments would build a hospital there, moving from a downtown site where it served the bar brawlers and "soiled doves" of the old saloon district known as Hell's Half Acre.

Until eight years ago, John Peter Smith Hospital and the JPS Health Network mainly fulfilled the charity-hospital role that Smith put into writing when he donated such valuable land.

Cecero, now a Southlake resident, wasn't hush-hush about his plan to change JPS into a profit-minded, free-market hospital that would fill its $97 million piggy bank with public tax money, yet compete with private hospitals for paying patients.

When he was hired, he said plainly that his goal was "going after more patients who are insured."

Along the way, he didn't even tell his own trustees about a $600,000-plus report full of scathing criticism. He will collect nearly $900,000 in paychecks before he officially leaves in July 2009.

Speaking to a Republican club in downtown Fort Worth on Thursday, Whitley promised that he and commissioners want to have a "hard discussion" with their JPS board appointees. (The judge and commissioners appoint two trustees each, with the 11th trustee chosen at large.)

Whitley was on the committee that chose Cecero. In an interview after the club meeting, Whitley praised Cecero for knowing healthcare finance and for adding services and clinics countywide, saying that Cecero leaves JPS "in much better financial shape" than predecessor Tony Alcini.

Whitley said we don't need to elect hospital trustees.

But he also said that commissioners shouldn't boss JPS.

"I don't appoint people to listen to me," he said.

If our commissioners won't boss JPS, who will?