Cook County Board President Todd Stroger defended his sales tax last night at a candidates forum on health care issues.
People, he said, “have been made to believe the sales tax has made their world crumble. … (Critics) can’t show you anything that shows the county is falling into the lake.”
Instead, Stroger told the audience, the penny-on-the-dollar tax kept hospitals and clinics open, maintaining the county’s safety net system.
“We are not going to be able to keep a health care system without funding it,” he said.
The health care forum was hosted by the Emergency Network to Save Cook County Health Services. It featured candidates running for Cook County Board president. Attendees included Stroger, Clerk of Court Dorothy Brown and Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, John Garrido and Tom Tresser.
Stroger’s challengers all support keeping the independent board that oversees the massive, struggling health system.
Garrido said it helps to keep politics out of the health system, but both he Stroger believe more oversight of the independent board is needed.
“We have to have some kind of mechanism where they are accountable to the constituents,” Stroger said, adding there is no means to discipline board members.
There needs to be a deeper connection between the health board and the community, argued Brown and Tresser.
“Make the board look like the community it serves,” he said, rather than a group largely made up of hospital administrators. The board should include community members and nurses, Tresser said.
To make up for a revenue hole resulting from the sales tax rollback and loss of one-time federal funds, Brown repeated her campaign point that the county must be proactive in finding more outside funds, touting her record of doing just that at the circuit court. She pledged to create a citizen budget review commission, and said early retirement programs would save money.
Garrido pledged to take a 10 percent pay cut (as Preckwinkle had the day before), and theorized he could save the county $165 million by instituting widespread spending cuts across county agencies.
And with the future of Oak Forest Hospital at risk, candidates said the county should do all it could to prevent it from closing.
“It’s a disgrace. How did it get to be that way?” Tresser said facetiously. During the event, he kept a large stack of newspaper clippings about corruption and county waste at his side.
“That facility needs to stay and it needs to have some sort of inpatients services,” Stroger said.
But Preckwinkle said she would look to the independent health board for answers
“When pushed, it is the independent health system that has to make these decisions, and I would defer to them,” she said.