The issue: Just as county hospital suffers a substandard rating, county board president claims bad press is Cook County government's biggest problem.
We say: Stroger's backward priorities and the declining level of county services are his big problems -- not news stories detailing the mismanagement.
The timing couldn't have been more telling.
Earlier this week, news organizations in Chicago reported that Cook County's Stroger Hospital was in danger of losing its accreditation. Such a loss would threaten more than $200 million in federal money.
The same day, county board President Todd Stroger told a civic group what he considers to be the county's biggest problem.
Bad press.
"The biggest challenge probably has been working through the bad press," Stroger said Monday at the annual meeting of the Cook County League of Women voters.
News stories, meanwhile, revealed that a surprise inspection of the county hospital had turned up 22 areas in which the hospital failed to meet standards. County officials say they have persuaded the nonprofit agency that evaluates hospitals -- now known as the Joint Commission -- to reduce the "areas of noncompliance" to 16. Fourteen substandard ratings from the internationally recognized health care evaluator would be enough to trigger conditional accreditation, putting funding at risk. The county will have until June 28 to correct the problems and safeguard its accreditation.
You might think the negative ratings and possible funding cuts to the troubled county health care system would be Stroger's biggest concern. After all, he has said repeatedly that health care is the county's "core mission." But he dismissed the ratings as overly technical and accused "union leaders" of being at the source of the findings. So while the hospital received its worst rating in more than two decades, according to one published report, the problem according to Stroger wasn't in the quality of services performed at the hospital. It was the fact that someone pointed it out -- which is pretty much the same argument he's making about the news media.
Meanwhile, Stroger hired two new assistants this week, including a $108,000-a-year attorney whose job will include sitting beside Stroger at county board meetings to help him answer questions. He'll be paid out of the public defender budget -- the office that supposedly provides legal representation for poor people. The other new hire is Sean Howard, a well-known spokesman for local politicians, who was forced to resign from the Stroger campaign last year when he was arrested on charges, later dropped, that he stalked a now-former girlfriend. Howard will be paid $85,000 to be director of public affairs for the county hospitals, working with the chief of the health bureau on "broad policy issues."
Maybe Stroger sees some logic in all of this. If "bad press" is your biggest problem, hiring a platoon of PR people might make sense. But to anyone else -- in particular to Cook County taxpayers -- the most important issue is whether the county is providing efficient services at a minimum cost. And to anyone else, it would be irresponsible and inappropriate for Stroger to keep expanding the public relations staff at the same time he's getting rid of doctors and nurses in the health care system.
This is yet another example of Stroger thumbing his nose at the public and at the concept of responsible government. Once again, he's criticizing the press for telling the truth about his unnecessary hirings of cronies and relatives at the same time he is slashing health care services the county's neediest residents depend on.
Stroger's priorities are out of whack, and anyone grounded in reality understands that laying the blame on reporters for his problems is a fantasy.
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