Miami shysters still roam this swamp
Al’s Loupe
Miami shysters still roam this swamp
By Alvaro F. Fernandez
alvaro@progreso-weekly.com
Miami can afford to build a baseball stadium using tax dollars. People who crunch numbers for a living now tell us that when you factor in the interest paid over time it will have cost us almost $2.5 billion dollars by the time we finish paying for it.
After construction is complete sometime next year, our leaders will be turning over the keys of the stadium to Jeffrey Loria, the multi-millionaire owner of the Miami Marlins. That’s what Miami taxpayers will get in return for our money: pride in our new palace and a change in name for the team – from Florida to Miami Marlins. Loria gets to keep almost everything else – plus the use of the stadium, which should help make him even wealthier.
Then there’s the Port of Miami tunnel. We can afford that too. It seems our leaders’ largess with our taxpayer dollars knows no boundaries. We should call it the tunnel that greed will have built… not our greed, mind you, but theirs – developers, politicians and who knows whom else, all folks who concocted this billion-dollar, less than a mile, hole under the port. It will cross under a small stretch of water from Watson Island to the Port of Miami. Some say it will create havoc on the MacArthur Causeway – the beautiful entrance to South Beach – while steering truck traffic away from the billion-dollar condo towers that stand on Biscayne Boulevard where the current entrance to the port now sits. Would it surprise you to know that the builders of these condos are all big time contributors to our politicians?
But the biggest swindle has yet to happen.
Remember… there is no money for education, but we can build a baseball stadium for rich athletes and an even richer team owner.
Now for ‘their’ latest grand plan. It’s been in the oven for years, cooked by master chefs known as shysters. It will soon be presented for devouring – by the Miami greed-meisters. It’s the Jackson Health System, whose main hospital is known as Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Jackson is one of Miami’s last remaining vestiges of the area’s social safety net. But remember we live in a country, a state that is dead-set on privatizing.
Before I continue, I will admit to not having any substantial proof for what I am about to write. But, I do have a pretty good nose for the news. As for Miami, I’ve lived here too long and know too many of the players.
That is why I am convinced that the depth of Jackson’s economic woes was planned. The hospital currently owes hundreds of millions of dollars. Things don’t look to get better, especially when you consider the type of politician we keep electing – think Governor Rick Scott, who never saw a public institution he didn’t want to make private.
It’s not far-fetched. Because the destruction of an institution like Jackson can be handled by the right people looking the other way and allowing mediocrity to reign while the hospital crumbles from the inside out. As the years go by the situation becomes dire. And suddenly an angel appears.
That angel happens to be a Boston company named Steward Health Care System that last week made a stunning proposal to buy the Jackson Health System for $1.1 billion. Steward, as reported by The Miami Herald, is owned by a Cuban American heart surgeon with family ties to South Florida. But what worried me most was this paragraph in the Miami Herald story:
“Steward has existed only since November, when Cerberus Capital Management finalized an $895 million deal to turn six Catholic hospitals into a for-profit entity. Steward has since bought two other small hospitals. Altogether, the Steward system has 1,565 licensed beds. Jackson has 2,100. [Ralph] de la Torre, [the Cuban American heart surgeon] has been a hospital executive for less than three years.”
My father used to warn me about easy money… and in this case, the deal smells of dead fish. Some of the people behind the scene, who I know are part of this deal, have been playing ball, shall we say, in Miami politics for some time. I don’t see a good outcome, if the deal is finalized.
Whatever the outcome, though, if Jackson is privatized, as appears to be a solution sought by some, expect continued and ever-increasing suffering by those who can’t afford health insurance. Also, don’t be surprised when Miami continues to sink deeper and deeper into a swamp of banana republicanism.
