John DeGroot’s eponymous blog has been threatened with legal action over his use of the district’s corporate seal. In a letter emailed Wednesday, an attorney for the North Broward Hospital District ordered DeGroot to stop using the nonprofit corporation’s logo and remove the image from his blog.In the context of…
Ray Fetcho has been reinstated as a nurse, but those who knew the former drag queen are still baffled that his license was challenged in the first place. People like Joe Adams, a Davie man who came to know Fetcho as the caretaker of Adams’ 84-year-old mother.”For my mom, he…
The U.S. health-care system has a tradition for cruelty toward the uninsured, and in Broward and Palm Beach counties, public hospital districts were created to deal with them. In exchange for treating the uninsured those districts could pocket hundreds of millions in tax dollars.But after President Barack Obama signs the…
Just got off the phone with Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who stepped off the House floor to describe the scene at the center of the political universe.”If you look at our side of the chamber, there’s a frenzy of activity, members hugging and smiling,” said Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat. “And…
In these times of health-care gouging, we can hardly blame middle-class families for skipping an annual checkup or for hoping that the pain, the nausea, the whooping cough will just go away on its own. Because who can afford to get sick?For Broward Health executives, physicians, and staff, this would…
Is there anyone out there besides George LeMieux and his fellow Republicans in Congress who think that this health care issue hasn’t been debated to death? To someone who was appointed to the U.S. Senate this past fall, it may seem like health care reform has sneaked up on Congress,…
The Broward State Attorney’s Office just released a closeout memo that explains its reasons for not filing a criminal case against attorney Marc Goldstone. The former general counsel of Broward Health, Goldstone was hired in late 2008, then fired by the public hospital district in mid-May 2009 after commissioners claim…
Chief Financial Officer Dawn Javersack is the latest member of the Broward Health executive staff to tender her resignation, following last month’s power shift on the hospital district’s board. On Friday, Javersack gave a one-month notice. She will be joining Boca Community Hospital, according to an email announcement by CEO…
Broward State Attorney’s Office has elected not to file criminal charges against Marc Goldstone, the former general counsel of Broward Health who was fired in May of last year after the hospital district’s commissioners claimed he’d deceived them about how he would be admitted to the Florida Bar Association.The move…
Patrick Maloney resigned Friday as the chief executive officer of Coral Springs Medical Center, inviting speculation that he found himself the wrong side of a political faultline at the public hospital district.There were signs of Maloney’s departure as recently as last week’s board meeting. That’s when Dr. Carrie Greenspan, chief…
After the earthquake struck Haiti, there wasn’t time to decide exactly what role South Florida hospitals would play in treating victims. Nor was there time to figure out how those facilities would be paid in instances where the victims were Haitian citizens. But three weeks after the devastating quake, there’s…
Broward Health CEO Frank Nask’s job is safe, as is that of a friend who he hired and to whom he gave a generous raise. Commissioner Mike Fernandez has received legal assurances that his job with an ultrasound manufacturer is not a conflict of interest. And seven appointed board members…
Tomorrow morning, Broward Health Chair Rhonda Calhoun will convene a board that has four new members, all appointed last week by Gov. Charlie Crist, who removed two colleagues whom Calhoun admired — commissioners Robert Bernstein and Dan Gordon.She was given no explanation by the governor’s office as to its reasons…
The morning after he learned he would be replaced on the Broward Health Board of Commissioners, Dan Gordon is trying to strike a diplomatic tone. Reached at the office of his Pompano Beach insurance company, Gordon said he was “not upset.” Rather, he was “surprised” by Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision…
Gov. Charlie Crist’s office has removed Commissioners Robert Bernstein and Dan Gordon from the Broward Health board in a maneuver that appears likely to spare Commissioner Mike Fernandez from an ethics inquiry and save the job of embattled CEO Frank Nask.Bernstein had been on an ethics rampage for the past…
Everybody wants to be on the Broward Health board, it seems, except the people who are actually on the Broward Health board. Specifically, the four-person majority of Mike Fernandez, Joseph Cobo, Rebecca Stoll, and Maureen Jaeger, whose politically motivated absences are responsible for the board’s having canceled its last two…
At 73 years old, Dr. Georges Boutin had never been to Haiti, and he had no reason to ever go until a phone conversation he had two weeks ago with his daughter Pier, an orthopedic surgeon who lives with her husband, Mark Hyman, in Massachusetts.The first pictures of the earthquake’s…
Broward Health Commissioner Mike Fernandez failed to attend this morning’s board meeting at Coral Springs Medical Center in what appears to be a thinly veiled effort to avoid voting on whether to fire the district’s CEO and to address concerns about whether he violated state ethics laws by failing to…
In January 2008, when Broward Health CEO Frank Nask promoted his friend Deborah Breen to his former position as the district’s chief financial officer, he gave Breen a raise that was 250 percent higher than the one that a previous interim CFO received just four years before.A source in the…
UPDATE: Broward Health just emailed new information containing its explanation for the strange entries I cite below. In short, they say they’re the product of a computer glitch. I’ve copied that explanation on the bottom of this post.Since 2001, Broward Health has spent nearly a million dollars on ultrasound equipment…
A question for the taxpayers in South Broward: How many of your tax dollars would you care to invest in a museum exhibit that will help your child get a firmer grasp of boogers, belches, and farts?”Not much,” replies every parent. “My kid’s already an expert on all three.” Well,…
A source at Broward Health tells us that the public hospital district CEO Frank Nask is walking with a skip in his step today, reportedly because he learned that Gov. Charlie Crist is close to appointing two new commissioners to the board.There is one unfilled seat on the board –…
