Stroger health board picks draw fire quickly
Cook County Board President Todd Stroger's picks for a panel overseeing the county's ailing health-care system immediately drew fire Thursday, with one appointee having once run a clinic into bankruptcy.
The selections are expected to draw close scrutiny from some Republican and reform commissioners when the board is asked to approve the panel Tuesday.
"I think there needs to be a little bit more of a balance here," said Commissioner Gregg Goslin, a Glenview Republican and a point person on the county's health-care system.
The panel will be charged with taking over the county's hospitals and clinic system -- headlined by the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, which has been the subject of corruption indictments and flooded in red ink for years.
Stroger and other commissioners embraced the idea of turning over the system to a separate panel last year after coming under attack from both labor and health advocacy groups for mismanagement.
"We owe it to our patients, our workers and our taxpayers to do all that we can to ensure that this system survives and thrives into the 21st century," Stroger said in a statement released Thursday regarding the appointments.
One of the potential targets Tuesday could be F. Daniel Cantrell, an aide to U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, a Chicago Democrat. He was in charge of the West Side Mile Square Health Center in the late 1980s when that facility filed for bankruptcy and came under fire from the IRS for failure to pay employment taxes.
Stroger praised Cantrell's years of experience in the industry, but Goslin balked.
"That person has not demonstrated good management skills," he said.
Cantrell said he shouldn't be barred from the panel. He said the clinic's closure was the direct result of losing major federal funding. He blamed the IRS issues on other executives.
"It is old history," he said. "We ran the clinic as efficiently as we could under the circumstances."
The other appointees include: Jorge Ramirez, secretary-treasurer of the Chicago Federation of Labor; Heather O'Donnell, health policy director at the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability; Norman Bobins, chairman emeritus of LaSalle Bank; Andrea Zopp, Exelon Corp. vice president; Barbara Hillman, labor relations and civil rights attorney; Quinn Golden, associate vice president of strategic affiliations and urban health initiatives at the University of Chicago Medical Center; Benn Greenspan, director of the Healthcare Administration Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; and David Carvalho, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.