A letter to the editor, published in June 2006 in the Fort-Bragg Advocate News

Eternal Vigilence is the Price of Liberty

The Hospital Resource Council (HRC)  discovered and revealed to the public that The Board of Directors of the Mendocino Coast District Hospital, along with the former CEO, Brian Ballard, consistently lost public money over the last 6 years eventually totaling over 7 Million dollars.

We owe it to ourselves to learn how these severe losses were allowed to continue year after year so that we may improve our system and prevent expensive future losses (if we improve we can at least call the present loss tuition).

The only present oversight that potentially protects the public from problems created by the Board are the by laws of the Board itself that state:

SECTION 7:     PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

The Board of Directors shall perform an annual evaluation of its performance and level of attainment of the goals and objectives based on the Hospitals current Mission Statement.

The evaluation may be performed by an ad hoc committee appointed by the Board of Directors (comprised of members of the Board of Directors and the Chief Executive Officer) and/or by a qualified individual or organization not affiliated with Mendocino Coast Health Care District.

This performance evaluation may include, but not be limited to: management effectiveness, community needs/external relations, compliance with accreditation and regulatory standards, economic performance goals for the Hospital, Hospital growth or expansion, fund development, Hospital staff relations, institutional planning, malpractice liability control, Medical Staff relations, meeting attendance and quality of care standards.

The Hospital Resource Council has requested that the Board reveal the evaluations which were made these past 6 years so that we may use the information to improve our system for the future.

Instead of willingly offering the evaluations and examining what has occurred the Board has, instead, refused to reveal the information and is hiding behind their lawyer.  Once cannot help but wonder what they are hiding.
The HRC offers, once again, to mediate with the Board over this issue in a public forum.  It would only be after seeking this mediation and failing that the HRC would resort to legal means of obtaining the Board's evaluations.

We believe it is a civic responsibility to use all legal and proper means to hold all elected officials accountable to the mission of the office they hold.Be it at the local level or the national government it appears to be an aspect of human nature that many of us become secretive when we sit on elected Boards.  An informed citizenry  must constantly train and retrain ourselves about the imperative of transparency in our elected officials. Failure to hold local officials responsible to the law can result in a loss of money or possibly a hospital.  Failure to hold national officials accountable to the law can result in a loss of freedom known as dictatorship.Rome did not fall overnight.  It was a process over  many generations of the erosion of liberty

Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty.

Richard Louis Miller, M.A., Ph..D.
for the Hospital Resource Council