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CEO at bankrupt Blythe hospital resigns
VOL. 12,
Inside Trump’s effort to ‘take over’ the midterm elections
By Joe Taglieri
By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, ProPublica
joet@beaconmedianews.com
C
EO Sandra Anaya of bankrupt Palo Verde Hospital announced resignation plans Wednesday. Her last day on the job after 13 years will be April 23, according to the Palo Verde Healthcare District, the business entity that runs the fiscally strapped hospital. It was unclear if district and county officials would seek a replacement chief executive. The hospital’s finances began to steadily decline over the last 10 years, however no one has attributed the losses to decision by Anaya on any other individual member of the hospital’s management staff. In February, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors OK’d a six-month rescue plan in an attempt to keep the hospital’s emergency room open — it is the only component of the facility that still operates and the only available emergency room within 70 miles of Blythe. “Anaya’s departure does not change the terms of the management services agreement with the county,” PVHD officials said in a statement. “Ownership of the hospital does not change, and the district remains the licensed hospital operator and retains all regulatory, licensure and emergency medical treatment and Labor Act responsibilities. Hospital employees remain employees of the district.” As part of the new management agreement, supervisors in March authorized $3.44 million from the county’s General Fund as payment to the California Department of Health Services on behalf of the hospital. County spokeswoman Brooke Federico said the payment covered the PVHD’s obligation to the California Voluntary Rate Range Program, which is part
Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe. | Photo courtesy of Palo Verde Hospital/Facebook
of Medi-Cal and administered by the state Department of Health Care Services. The “intergovernmental transfer” payment enabled the district to access over $9 million in taxpayer-backed credit available through Medi-Cal to support hospital operations. DHCS spokesman Anthony Cava said in a statement that the agency “understands the serious challenges facing Palo Verde Hospital and the concern this creates for the community. After a thorough review, DHCS determined that the funds provided by the Palo Verde Healthcare District to participate in the Voluntary Rate Range Program did not meet federal and state requirements for permissible funding sources.” The federal government requires that the nonfederal portion of Medi-Cal funding comes from allowable sources, Cava said. “In this case, the Intergovernmental Transfer contribution was funded through a loan that required repayment using Medi-Cal payments that were funded with the IGT, a structure prohibited by federal rules,” he said.
“DHCS worked with Palo Verde Healthcare District several times — first to explain which funding sources were allowed before any funds were transferred, and later to review the situation before declining to accept the IGT to protect Medi-Cal’s integrity and ensure compliance with federal law,” according to Cava. The county Board of Supervisors also authorized a “strike team” of medical professionals from the Riverside University Health System that initiated reform measures Feb. 23 intended to stabilize the Blythe hospital’s emergency care capability. The RUHS team was added to a $1 million stabilization loan the board OK’d in January for the fiscally struggling facility. County supervisors have also filled one of two vacancies on the PVHD Board of Directors with the appointment last month of Palo Verde College administrator Jaclyn Randall. Voters will choose who fills the other vacant seat in the November general election. Under the management services agreement, RUHS staff are tasked with
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implementing all necessary processes connected to the county’s 180-day strike team support plan, with the primary goal of maintaining emergency operations at the hospital. Without Palo Verde Hospital’s emergency room, the area’s nearly 20,000 residents would lose access to “timely treatment for lifethreatening conditions where minutes matter,” according to a county statement in January. The agreement between the county and PVHD specifies the county will have “first priority” among creditors and will not be liable for any of the district’s debts. In late September, the PVHD board voted to pursue federal Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to reduce financial losses. Administrators said the hospital had struggled to remain solvent since the start of the current decade, with revenue streams declining despite patient loads remaining unchanged. The California Health Facilities Financing Authority provided $8.5 million from the Distressed Hospital Program in 2023, but that turned out to be a short-term fix, according to the PVHD. Officials also expressed frustration about the inability to find a chief financial officer who would remain in place to solve the financial woes — the district had four CFOs in an 18-month span. The county’s initial $1 million loan will cover hospital staff salaries and benefits, pharmaceuticals, equipment purchases, utilities, billing operations and some legal expenses associated with Chapter 9 proceedings. The possibility of a wholesale county takeover of the hospital’s emergency department has not been ruled out publicly.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive The Big Story newsletter as soon as it’s published.
I
n mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked? ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no
See Midterm elections Page 05
evidence “to date” of widespread fraud. The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots. Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job. At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House. What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him. Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms. “I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become