CBS Sunday Morning April 12, 2020.
Hospital administrators, despite all evidence of failure, are still steering a profits-first, corporate healthcare system, but now they’re requiring a lot of public relations help to prop up their tarnished images. One of them, twin cities Allina healthcare system CEO Penny Wheeler, recently got a national media spotlight—not surprising given the mainstream media’s role in preserving the corporate and military status quo. (Note: There was no national media follow-up when Allina frontline nurses working with inadequate PPE were disciplined and fired and when they protested Allina and skewered Wheeler and her administrators’ “leadership.”)
On April 12, 2020, CBS Sunday Morning featured a COVID-related lead story, What Kind of Leadership Does Our Nation Need? Nationally known media anchor Jane Pauley introduced the segment with these words “Deep into a crisis many are comparing to war…” Ancient Ted Koppel then interviewed these three mainstream-media-anointed “national leaders” who he referred to as “a warrior, a doctor and a priest.”
Following on Pauley’s war analogy, Retired US Army General Stanley McChrystal
Jesuit priest and president of Fordham University in New York Joseph McShane
Allina Health system CEO Penny Wheeler, MD
After 19 years of nonstop war, and while the US economy melts down, more than 30 million are now unemployed, deaths spike, underserved, minority populations suffer, and the US private, profit-driven healthcare system implodes, Jane Pauley, Ted Koppel and CBS offered up typical you-can-trust-the-people-at-the-top propaganda.
McChrystal
McChrystal has his own set of problems. He led US forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. After Rolling Stone published an article where the author says McChrystal and his aides mocked then Vice President Biden and other administration officials, McChrystal was recalled to Washington where Obama accepted his resignation. Prior to his Afghanistan appointment, although McChrystal was credited with the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, his Zarqawi unit became well known for its interrogation methods, particularly at one camp where the unit was accused of abusing detainees. Some allege that McChrystal also had a part in covering up the Pat Tillman friendly fire incident
The ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (now 19 years long) have cost an estimated $4.4 trillion so far. A probably grossly underestimated 400,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians have been killed along with 8000 US service members; 20,000 service members have been wounded. And the military is still there.
McChrystal now runs his own consulting firm, a lucrative business for retired generals with government and corporate connections.
McShane
McShane, president of Fordham, offered a few simplistic but kind words on leadership responsibility. He doesn’t have the same baggage—i.e., responsibility for the actual lives of his underlings—as either McChrystal or Wheeler, whose claims to expertise include leading ongoing, decades-long wars-without-end and corporate-run, profits-first failing healthcare systems.
Wheeler
CBS undoubtedly picked Wheeler as their healthcare “leader” for one reason—she’s one of the few US healthcare CEOs who’s a former physician and a woman; her OB/GYN specialty is an extra plus with its earth mother vibe. She left medicine behind years ago to climb the corporate pay ladder to a $3 million 2018 compensation package. Allina Health, like every other US healthcare system, both profit and nonprofit, is a business not a guardian of public health or a community service. Wheeler has said so, quite openly, in multiple published interviews over the last 10 years. For both for-profit and nonprofit healthcare systems, the bottom line drives executive and administrative decision making, now with devastating consequences for patients, communities, and frontline workers. The US healthcare system (the most expensive in the world) has shown itself to be an internationally acknowledged failure and a national disgrace. Americans face both a massive public health crisis and a catastrophic economic meltdown. And yet the mainstream media tells us that one of that failed system’s CEOs is a national “leader.”
Since the SARS outbreak in 2003, multiple international agencies, US federal and state agencies, and global and US infectious disease experts have warned of a coming pandemic and published preparedness plans and recommendations. All warned of the potential for massive supply chain disruption, mass unemployment, shortages of equipment including ventilators and PPE, long vaccine lead times, delayed (profit-generating) elective surgeries effecting hospital cash flows, and unnecessary deaths. All were ignored. Frontline workers, months in to the pandemic, are still begging for PPE.
Planning and stockpiling are not profitable—that’s how the capitalist, market-driven system works. Unless a ventilator is hooked up to a paying customer, it’s just a drag on the balance sheet. The same with PPE—it needs to be used so the cost + markup can be quickly passed along to a patient..
During the almost 20-year warning window, Allina, under Wheeler’s leadership, made a $100 million investment in 2018 in 7wire, a Chicago-based venture capital fund. Allina inked a prior $100 million deal with HealthCatalyst in 2015. In March of this year, while Covid was bearing down on the Midwest and it was clear that hospital systems had no stockpiled equipment, Wheeler herself joined the board of New York tech startup Cedar, a company developing healthcare billing software. Outside board members typically get an equity stake, so in the face of a pending catastrophe, she took time our for personal profit-seeking.
Hospitals like Allina’s are now risking frontline workers lives allowing them to work with infected patients with inadequate PPE while cutting staff and benefits to cover their dizzying drop in cash flow after elective surgeries got postponed. Across the country, nurses and other workers are quitting, falling ill, and even dying. And those workers who raise alarms to protect themselves, their families, and their communities are simply fired, as Wheeler’s hospital just did with two frontline nurses. That’s one way to cover the criminal negligence of hospitals and their well-compensated executives.
So to frontline workers risking their health and lives, here are the leadership lessons Wheeler offers to a national audience:
“My job is to learn from them [employees of Allina] and get barriers that are creating barriers [sic] to their care or their growth out of the way. That’s how I approach leadership.”
“First [leadership lesson] of all, don’t be in denial of what the true situation was. And get the information from every vantage point you possible can.”
“The second is learn as much as you can from the people closest to the work. They will help guide your choices and decisions. There’s genius out there that that you need to listen to.”
“The third is, boy, collaborate as much as you can with others; communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate.
Drivel and lies. In fact, Wheeler and her administrators refused to collaborate with emergency room nurses and other COVID-facing ER staff when staff requested use of hospital scrubs to avoid taking their own contaminated scrubs home to their families. Wheeler insisted on the hierarchical scrubs dressscode and fired an ER nurse over the issue—in a pandemic—resulting in a nurse march and protest from an Allina hosptial to the state capitol. Wheeler, like all good corporatists, follows the Rahm Emanual playbook; never let a crisis go to waste. Under her leadership and in a public health crisis, her healthcare system harasses and fires nurses and engages in union busing. That’s what constitutes a corporate “leader” according to mainstream media.
Allina frontline workers say they are neither consulted nor informed. The information they get from their executive leaders? Wheeler’s and her executives’ Facebook public relations videos intended to calm the public so they show up for medical services.
Allina’s frontline workers, like frontline workers across the country, are ill-equipped, ill-protected, and risking their own lives and health, and that of their families, to treat patients and earn a living. Like all other hospital CEOs and executives, Wheeler and her administrators stockpiled no equipment and apparently never read warning and preparedness reports—or did and ignored them. Her chief operations officer (the person who typically has oversight of the supply chain—acquiring supplies like ventilators and PPE) is a former dietician with an online MBA, a PhD in leadership, and a $1 million+ compensation package. The president of two Allina hospitals, the woman who recently fired two nurses, has an undergraduate degree in business, an online MHA (masters in healthcare administration), and a $1 million+ compensation package. In a Zoom interview she gave with a Minnesota state rep as COVID was barreling toward Minnesota, she made this disingenuous statement: “Who could have dreamt that this could have happened?”
Healthcare leaders? Wheeler and her administrators, like so many other healthcare executives, are self-serving opportunists. They help themselves not public health. It’s long past time for a new healthcare system that puts workers and communities first.
