Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
When someone’s job is to serve the public, it’s important they remain impartial — nothing should interfere with their commitment to serve. Muddling personal, financial or political interests with the interest of the people is a blatant violation of this commitment and should rightfully lead to public humiliation and disgrace.
About two weeks ago, the Baltimore Sun divulged that Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and other members of the University of Maryland Medical System Board of Directors — who are supposed to be unpaid — had backdoor business deals with the hospital network. Pugh was accused of selling children’s books to the nonprofit hospital system and netting $100,000 in profit. She has since resigned from the board.
But Pugh’s business deals, while the most publicized, were far from the most lucrative. Two board members, M&T Bank executive August Chiasera and former state Sen. Francis Kelly, benefited from agreements with the medical system worth millions of dollars. Over the past two years, M&T Bank received more than $7.4 million in revenue and fees from such deals, and Kelly’s insurance company reported about $4.4 million in revenue from them.
It could be argued that the goods and services these deals provided — such as finance management, health care consulting and children’s books — are all essential to the hospital system and the affiliations of the board members simplified the negotiation process. Nothing was sold to the medical system that wasn’t loosely tied to medicine, or at least the system’s administrative services.
Recent discoveries, however, have raised some questions about the demand for these goods and services. Pugh claims that her deal with the system was intended to generate a large supply of books for children in schools and at daycare centers, educating them on the importance of healthy lifestyles and eating. However, many of the 100,000 books the medical system purchased between 2011 and 2018 have yet to be located. Among those that have been found, 8,700 books were stowed away in a warehouse for a Baltimore school district.
It’s quite possible that the medical system encountered various administrative roadblocks while distributing the books. However, it’s undeniably suspicious that many of the books never reached their intended audience over the course of seven years. In addition, it’s a bit peculiar that Pugh, as a public servant, did not go above and beyond to show she was doing all of this in the open. She seems to have conducted a backdoor deal with the medical system that resulted in a covert donation instead. The prevalent theme here is a direct avoidance of public scrutiny.
Since the process in which these deals were reached is still private, it’s unclear which contracts had a competitive bidding process from independent companies and which did not. Despite the ambiguity, the fact that almost one-third of the board members were conducting business with the hospital system should raise red flags and strongly points towards no-bid contracting, which prevents potentially higher-quality goods and services from benefiting the patients and staff who actually need them.
It’s also important to remember that these officials all serve on an unpaid board for a nonprofit organization. They willingly chose to serve in an uncompensated position, presumably to work toward advancing the quality of care in the various hospitals that are part of the medical system.
By generating profit from various business deals, the officials in question not only taint the sanctity of their positions but demonstrate that their primary commitments are not serving the public. Based on the disclosed deals, we can assume that some of these members are abusing their intimate relationship with the system to make more money than they would otherwise garner from their position.
The welfare of the people should never be in the hands of those with personal motivations that could detract from their ability to protect the public. And fortunately, lawmakers are drafting legislation that will limit the financial freedom of current and future board members. The issue, however, is far from resolved, and many questions still remain. The one question on everyone’s mind: Who let this happen?
Kevin Hu is a freshman physiology and neurobiology major. He can be reached at kevxhu@gmail.com.
