The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is the North Broward Hospital district and its former Chief Executive Wil Trower. They get the award for the following.

Despite public pronouncements that Broward County's biggest public health care system is in great financial shape, the hospitals and clinics are losing $209 million a year, chief executive Alan Levine said Thursday.

The operational losses at the North Broward Hospital District have increased by almost $10 million a year, said Levine, who was hired in June to overhaul the system. He said the district has claimed profits of $154 million for the past seven years, but using a new method of looking at the data, he determined that the district lost $1.3 billion and used property taxes to make up for it.

The public health system is not in financial jeopardy. All operational losses are covered by taxes, which are collected to treat those without insurance, Levine said."

Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Broward County taxpayers will get hit with this debacle at Property tax time.

The district, which has a budget of $860 million a year to provide health care north of Griffin Road, collected increased taxes each year to make up for the losses because of rising property values. Unless the losses are reversed, even more taxes may have to be raised in the future, Levine said.

Previous district managers used a method of presenting financial information that hid the losses, he said.

The former formula added property taxes to the revenues. Levine removed property taxes, investment income and donations and only compared revenue from patients with how much it cost to treat them. He said that was a better way to measure the operating efficiency of the hospitals and clinics.

Levine, who released the information at a meeting of the district's governing board of commissioners Wednesday, would not say whether he thought the previous chief executive, Wil Trower, deliberately hid the district's deteriorating fiscal health.

Bernstein was not reluctant to blame Trower. He said he suspects that only select financial data were made public in the past to mask operating losses and inefficiencies.

"If the [losses] were important to our past leader, we would have seen this before," Bernstein said. "The way the financial statements were prepared and shown to the public were deceptive."

Trower should be prosecuted if his actions are in slightest way criminal. At the very least he shouldn't be getting a pension from his old job.(If he is receiving one) Some how I wouldn't count either of them happening.

Don't stories like this want you to have National Health Care? NOT! For monumental incompetence and probable fraud, The North Broward Hospital district and its former Chief Executive Wil Trower are today's knuckleheads of the day.

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