UPMC vs. Tom Wolf
When UPMC claimed last week that Gov. Tom Wolf's criticism of the health care giant is the result of pro-union bias, it should have sparked the guffaw heard 'round the commonwealth. The governor had criticized UPMC for a decision that would require 182,000 elderly patients to change insurance or lose their regular doctors.
UPMC countered with a bias charge, ignoring the real issue, citing campaign contributions to Wolf from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been trying to organize UPMC workers. UPMC also spotlighted the appointment of Mike Brunelle, a former SEIU director, as Wolf's special assistant.
“All you have to do is look at the person he has assigned to be his lead staff person on health care issues — and look at his record,” said UPMC spokesman Paul Wood.
But UPMC had a different diagnosis regarding its own relationship with the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett during his four years in office, openly touting its moves to strengthen its hand in Harrisburg. In 2012, UPMC hired lobbyist Scott Baker to be its vice president and chief government affairs officer.
Baker had served on Corbett's transition team. And when he was hired, he was described by a local consultant as “someone with a lot of yank,” which is what everybody wants in a lobbyist. A year later, Corbett hired a new chief of staff, Leslie Gromis-Baker, Scott Baker's wife and a veteran Republican operative.
Maybe UPMC has forgotten that old admonition against throwing stones if you live in a glass house. Could the faux nonprofit sincerely believe that what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander?
Or might its response be a bad case of willful blindness, a conscious effort to ignore an inconvenient truth?
UPMC, Corbett and, now, Wolf all hired the best talent available and no one should be surprised that they sought individuals who share their values. It takes real chutzpah for UPMC, after years of successfully playing an inside game, to whine when public policy seems to be taking a turn it did not orchestrate.
And no one should feel sorry for UPMC just yet because many politicians still stand with it. Sen. Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson County, the president pro tempore of the Senate, told the Trib, “It troubles me that we have such a world-class organization very much getting a raw shake by the administration.”
And it is good to know where the line has been drawn because “a raw shake” is exactly what the elderly and infirm of this region, along with many UPMC employees, feel that they have been getting. Everybody is sick of this struggle and Wolf must end it.
It is as if Antonio Gramsci, the Mussolini nemesis, foresaw the passion play that is Pittsburgh health care when he said: “(T)he old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Joseph Sabino Mistick, a lawyer, law professor and political analyst, lives in Squirrel Hill (joemistick.com).
