todd vainisi wrote:Folks, I'm on page 120 of this deposition. I'm not a lawyer or in any way versed in the law, but I've got to say, this deposition, so far, reinforces what I've believed all along about Mayor Summers. That he was thrust into the drivers seat of a car crash already in progress and his choices were to steer the vehicle into a ditch on the side of the road, plow into the car in front of him, or veer into oncoming traffic. I have so far seen none of the so called malicious or greedy intent that has been thrown around.
The whole premise that Lakewood Hospital could be owned by Lakewood but run by CCF seems foolish and disastrous, to me, in retrospect. Of course CCF will value Lakewood Hospital the least, it doesn't control it. Of course the experienced team from CCF got a deal done in the 90s that was only to their benefit and included nothing that could force them into anything.
I've been very interested in getting to the bottom of this decanting plan, and that first 120 pages of deposition goes into it in quite a bit of detail. SLH has led me to believe that CCF moved these services out of the hospital in order to make the hospital less viable. The mayor's testimony suggests something totally different - that these services were money losers. Even the early removal of the cardiac unit - Lakewood was only doing 70 surgeries a year. Is that where you want your heart surgery done - in a hospital where a surgery like that only happens 6 times a month - or someplace where they do them almost every day?
The mayor even seems to validate my very first reaction to the hospital closing - my thought, which I was taught by SLH was totally erroneous, was that nobody wants to go there and that doctors don't want to refer their patients there either, they would prefer a shiny new hospital or at least a bigger one. The mayor points out that LH was short 5,000 patients a year and that the only way to get those patients back is if doctors send patients there. Are these lies?
I'm going to read this whole thing. I'm somewhat shocked at how different my takeaways have been from what's being said here. Maybe some of you can help clarify some of those points. Maybe the next 150 pages of deposition will change my mind. Maybe the bidding process will be the sticking point that shows how badly the mayor did for us or his selfish/evil intent to grab LHA's trustee millions. So far, I'm feeling rather tricked by SLH.
Todd,
I respect all of your posts and I am glad to see you are so open minded. You write that you held a belief that favored closure, you write that SLH evidence got you to see it differently, and now you've read 1/3 of Summers' sworn testimony and you write that you "feel" tricked, you properly write "the mayor's testimony suggests," but you're still open to reading and hearing more. I agree that making a final judgement listening to only one witness and prior to hearing all of the evidence would not be open minded.
Needless to say that given the hard evidence that I have accumulated over the past 10 months, I came to a completely different conclusion about the first 100 pages of the transcript.
I would ask that anyone to comment on the implications of just two of Summers' answers (I think they are from page 95-97):
12 Atty. Dever: Did you ask Subsidium to come up with some values
13 for the hospital?
14 Summers: No. No, we did not.
[Actually Subsidum had done a comparative analysis of recent hospital sales that showed the hospital was worth $70M see atached (without the $50 portfolio, so $120M)]
15 Atty. Dever: Did you ask Subsidium to come up with a strategy of
16 possibly selling the entire hospital?
17 Summers: No.
My comment: Summers, Madigan, Bullock never tried to sell the hospital. Why? If they sold it for ½ of Subsidium’s valuation, then wouldn’t there still be someone operating a hospital in Lakewood and wouldn't Lakewood also have $60M to invest in other “transformative delivery” of healthcare or something else? Maybe to buy some land elsewhere in Lakewood and build a nice outpatient facility to serve those needs?
One councilmember told me "this stopped being about healthcare a long time ago."
The evidence suggest that the non compete was something Summers wanted, i.e. he did not want healthcare delivered from the building and location we knew as Lakewood Hospital.
Doesn't this testimony and evidence suggest that this was never about healthcare?
If this was never about healthcare then why has Summers testified that is what this has about?