By VICKI URBANIK

Increasing competition from for-profit providers threaten to suck the life out of the county hospital Porter, skimming the profitable services while paying only lip service to community health care where there is little money to be made.

Porter Hospital President and Chief Executive Officer Ron Winger not only gave that warning Thursday, but cited a specific venture, TC Health Care Corp., a physician-owned for-profit that he said is now aggressively recruiting physician investors for a new hospital in Porter County, using a business model that includes a “national franchise of future hospitals.”

Speaking before a roomful of more than 100, Winger said Porter has its battles with its non-profit neighbors, but the competition he fears the most is from the for-profit providers, because, driven by the bottom line, they can reap high-profit services with excellent reimbursement rates from insurance companies.

Though the increasing level of indigent care is an issue the county must address, Winger pledged Porter’s commitment toward all patients, insured or not, and continuing the vision of community-focused health care that was first established with a donation by Dr. D.J. Loring in 1939 that established the county hospital.

“Access to health care is viewed as a universal right, and in my opinion that’s the way it should be,” he said.

Winger made his comments at a joint meeting between the hospital board and the Porter County Commissioners as a follow-up to the meeting held three weeks ago. At that meeting, a large crowd, many of whom were hospital employees, spoke in support of the Winger and the hospital, and challenged the motives of the hospital critics.

Thursday’s meeting attracted just as large of a crowd, and once again, most were Porter supporters and employees, many of whom wore tags or carried signs saying “Porter, Not Politics.”

While both commissioners Robert Harper and John Evans addressed the crowd, South County Commissioner Carole Knoblock did not.

Just two weeks ago, Knoblock caused a stir after calling for the resignations of Winger and the entire hospital board. The lack of a statement from Knoblock clearly left some hospital employees frustrated. Porter associate Angie Hampton said not all of the questions raised by the associates three weeks ago were answered Thursday; she specifically cited the request that the commissioners outline their background and qualifications for judging the hospital, which was left unanswered by Knoblock.

Harper Seeks Apology

Harper gave the only criticism of the night. He opened his lengthy address to the crowd with the personal story about how he was rushed to the hospital the day after the last forum with dangerously high blood pressure.

As he was in the ambulance, “I thought, ‘ I’m going to Porter,’” he said, eliciting laughs from the audience, as he proceeded to tell how the first person he met at the hospital was nurse Pat Kearby, who last month took Harper and the other hospital critics to task.

“She was still giving me hell when I left Porter,” he joked.

But Harper did turn serious, calling on the hospital board to issue an apology to former board members William Back and Robert Parks over a letter that Harper said threatened criminal legal action after they were quoted in a newspaper discussing a contractual issue.

The letter cited confidentiality issues that may have been broached, but Harper said no attorney at a public hospital should threaten board members for publicly speaking out.

Of all the things he’s dealt with as commissioner, nothing has “disturbed me more than this letter,” Harper said.

Harper called on the hospital and its board to be more open with the public, saying that secretiveness only fuels the public’s skepticism. He said he fully understands that many issues must be discussed in private, but that there are plenty of other issues that don’t have to be hidden.

“Every little bit of business isn’t strategic planning,” he said.

As one example, he distributed to all the hospital board members a thick document containing the claims from the Indianapolis firm of Hall Render, which Harper said gets paid around $600,000 a year from the hospital to handle its legal work. Page after page of the itemized statements were blacked out.

Sound Finances

Winger twice addressed the crowd, emphasizing that Porter’s finances are sound. He also several times urged the commissioners to approve the pending bond issue, a plea that Harper said he took exception with due to still lingering questions about the bond.

Winger invited the public to view the upcoming release of the 2004 audit, which will be posted on the hospital’s website. The recent secretly recorded conversations between Parks and hospital Chief Financial Officer Hugh King, who painted the hospital finances as bleak, led to “some gross misconceptions and unfounded perceptions,” Winger said.

He called on the public to base their judgments on “facts, accurate figures and the truth,” and said the upcoming audit will present an accurate financial picture.

He also pledged a spirit of cooperation with the commissioners to move forward.

“There’s more at stake than a simple bond refinancing, than compensation levels or whether we change our business model to another form. What’s at stake is the very existence of Porter and what has brought this community together since 1939,” Winger said.

Also speaking Thursday on behalf of the hospital was board member Mary Beth Schultz, whose seat will come up for appointment in two months. Schultz outlined how the board uses Mercer Consulting to help set executive pay and benefits, and said the board believes the compensation at Porter is in line with hospitals of comparable size.

Another hospital speaker was Dr. Joseph Venditti, who praised the hospital for its state-of-the-art departments and who ripped into hospital critics.

“They may think they are criticizing the administration or the running of the hospital, but they are inadvertently criticizing all of my colleagues and the associates at Porter who are not concerned with running the hospital, contract negotiations or, for that matter, the bond issue, but with providing the best possible care for their patients,” he said.

Politics?

Evans, who received a round of applause even before he spoke, characterized the Parks-King tapes as largely two men’s opinions, with practically every substantive issue previously addressed. He said there was nothing “new or newsworthy” in those tapes, as he proceeded to rip the media for its coverage of the hospital.

He cited a long list of commissioner issues, from funding for mass transit to amending the open space ordinance to providing more resources to the building department.

The commissioners should be spending more time “fixing things that are broken and less time breaking things that are not.”

Harper said he agrees politics should be left out of the hospital, but said it’s a fact that politics has played a role at the hospital for years. He noted that much of the money poured into commissioner campaigns comes from people who “want to get on the hospital board.”

And Harper named names: Dr. John Johnson supported former Republican commissioner Brian Gesse; the Democratic campaigns of Jack Clem and Dave Burrus were “entirely funded by doctors”; Parks served as a Democratic fundraiser; and hospital board member Barb Young has been a major contributor to various Republican campaigns.

“We’re all involved in it, Republican and Democrat,” Harper said.

• Porter hospital has the full transcript of the March 24 meeting, as well as the comments by their representatives at Thursday’s meeting, available on its website,  http://www.porterhealth.org

Posted 4/15/2005