This just in, from the El Paso Inc.:
Troubles may be mounting for El Paso Children’s Hospital, which saw its chief financial officer and human resources director resign last week and had a surprise visit by the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals.
Children’s faces a number of wrongful death or injury lawsuits, including one brought by El Paso businessman and former mayoral candidate David Saucedo, who says his 3-year-old daughter died at Children’s in 2019 after being denied care by the hospital’s doctors for nearly 12 hours.
Saucedo specifically blames Dr. Robert Canales, who still has a controversial arrangement with Children’s that the Texas Tech University physicians who work in the pediatric intensive care unit cannot tend to his patients.
Children’s, a nonprofit organization under El Paso County’s University Medical Center, is claiming governmental immunity from liability in the wrongful death and malpractice lawsuits brought by the Saucedos and other plaintiffs.
Whoa.
Not only are they facing numerous lawsuits, including for letting a little girl die, but they’re saying that you can’t sue them, because they’re part of the government.
Remember that the Children’s Hospital is Congresswoman Veronica Escobar’s baby, from back when she was County Judge. The hospital is still featured prominently on her official biography webpage, for now. (Also, curiously, her webpage has a picture of Juarez on it.)
All of our local politicians want to dream big, and leave a mess behind. They’re itinerant snake oil salesmen. As soon as the checks clear, they’re on the next bus.
The Children’s Hospital, and the 2012 Quality of Life Bond projects, and the ballpark, were all foisted on us by a cabal of well-meaning politicians who fervently believed that we would grow into them.
Well, we didn’t.
Our current crop of elected officials are skipping blithely down the same path into political oblivion. They must see their own fortunes fading before them.
Mustn’t they?
Those are the kinds of projects that we should get into when we’re ahead of the game. Those are the kinds of projects that we should complete by leveraging our winnings. We shouldn’t bet on our future with borrowed money.
We can’t borrow our way to prosperity. We can’t fake it till we make it. We have to tighten our belts and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and employ whatever other sartorial analogies suit the situation.
You hear the occasional anecdote about the good that Children’s Hospital is doing, but what about the horror stories we’re not told about? What about the number of wrongful death or injury lawsuits that don’t make the papers? What about Children’s Hospital’s policy of pleading governmental immunity from lawsuits?
El Pasoans are the victims of good intentions.
I could never figure out what the deal was there. $120MM “for the children” but it was really for a building that wasn’t owned by EPCH; it was owned by UMC that then provided “services” to EPCH and billed EPCH for it. So EPCH was a business entity captive to UMC? Hard to know because it was all smoke and mirrors.
My guess is (sorry for being so cynical) that it had nothing to do with the kids who were adequately served by local hospitals that gave them TB. EPCH was set up to be a cash cow for UMC to milk thru services provided to EPCH, rent included for the building we thought we paid for. Great way to avoid transparency. Actually, genius; you could do anything you wanted with that money. Give it to Bob Jones, Paul, Woody, the doctors, bail out UMC…
It fell apart when Medicaid reimbursements were cut and there wasn’t enough cash coming in to keep the Ponzi scheme running. But I could be wrong and it would be great if someone researched it and made the results public. That used to be called the local press.
Marina Estrada the Human Resources director is such a fraud…. Just speak to all the nurses she fired when she started working there and all the unfairness we encountered by her. A total monster!! Truly I believe now what goes around comes around