Year after year, Southeastern Wisconsin is plagued with medical care costs that rise faster than in other Midwestern cities. Empire building by ever bigger medical care chains might help explain the problem. And Aurora Health Care always seems to be at the center of the issue.
A few years back, when Aurora proposed to build a new hospital in the Village of Summit in Waukesha County, some business leaders in the area opposed this, arguing the area was already well-served by the Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital just five miles away, operated by the smaller ProHealth Care chain. One of the notable supporters of Aurora, Mark Belling, sneered at its opponents as a “few simps in the business community.”
Well, Mark, the hospital was built and Corrinne Hess at The Business Journal chronicles the results: Aurora’s hospital has an occupancy rate as low as 23 percent and has never exceeded 37 percent. Meanwhile, Oconomowoc Memorial, which had a 55 percent occupancy rate, has seen that drop to as low as 31 percent. Both hospitals are far below the 60 to 70 percent occupancy experts say is needed for maximum efficiency. As a result, the cost per patient is far too high.
This proves “there wasn’t a need to build a second hospital in that market,” said Dianne Kiehl, executive director of Business Health Care Group, a Franklin-based coalition of area employers. “Government doesn’t give them more money to pay the bill with higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, so these shortfalls are made up off the business community,” she complained to the Biz Journal.
Hess, who has been doing the best coverage on this issue, did another Biz Journal story regarding the duplication in Ozaukee County, where Columbia St. Mary’s built a hospital in Mequon, and Aurora later built a hospital 10 miles away in Grafton. Since then, the story noted, the occupancy at the Columbia St. Mary’s hospital plunged by 30 percent, dropping from a healthy occupancy of 70 to 84 percent to just 56 to 74 percent. Meanwhile, Aurora Medical Center in Grafton has averaged an abysmal 24 to 42 percent occupancy rate. Once again, it appears that two hospitals weren’t needed in the area, certainly not hospitals of that size. Columbia St. Mary’s is already laying off employees, blaming competition from Aurora.
These hospitals are expensive: Aurora’s facility in Summit cost $189 million, and its Grafton hospital cost $184 million. And their costs will get passed on to individuals and businesses paying for health insurance.
Aurora chief executive Nick Turkal wrote a blog entry to Aurora employees claiming that any problem of duplication in Ozaukee County is all the fault of former Columbia St. Mary’s CEO Leo Brideau, who rejected Turkal’s proposal that the two chains do a joint project in the area. Brideau adamantly denied this, telling Hess that “for Aurora, the definition of collaboration means taking over, which is unacceptable.”
It’s worth noting that both organizations are tax-exempt nonprofits that successfully solicit charitable dollars from this metro area. They have boards made up of prominent private sector leaders who are supposed to be guiding their decisions to make sure they best serve the greater community. That doesn’t appear to have happened in Waukesha and Ozaukee counties.
Fixing Juneau Park
As reported a while back in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a plan to improve Juneau Park and Cathedral Square was proposed by developer Gary Grunau, the East Town Association and Friends of Juneau Park. That immediately set off a dispute, with the group led by Grunau proposing to use a property tax assessment on residents and businesses in that area to pay for the improvements. In response, Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic questioned whether the money could be raised privately.
This sounds like the sort of dispute that could kill the idea. But more people might get excited about the concept if there was a clear plan for how to improve Juneau Park. And writer Tom Bamberger provided the perfect template in a July 2009 story for Milwaukee Magazine.
Currently, he noted, Juneau Park is “staid and stale…a pass-through corridor that takes people someplace else… It’s surrounded by the densest concentration of residential, corporate and cultural real estate in Wisconsin, yet, remarkably, neither connects nor responds to its contemporary context.”
Bamberger suggested several ways to improve the park:
First, cut down the trees along its edge. “It might be the most sublime vantage point in Milwaukee. But you wouldn’t know it because two-thirds of the park blocks the view of the lake with an inevitable wall of trees.”
Second, connect the park to the lakefront. “Imagine how a great landscape designer might approach the issue of connecting the park and lakefront.” Grunau’s group has proposed stairs and ramps that would presumably do this, but surely something grander might inspire the imagination of potential donors.
Third, landscape the park in way that responds to its surroundings. “Imagine… how Piet Oudolf might respond to the western wall of high-rises: his Millennium Park meadowland [in Chicago] allows plants to align and contrast with the surrounding skyline in countless interesting ways. His gardens are also designed to retain their splendor after freezing, which would bring suburban gardeners to visit Juneau Park in spring, summer, winter and fall.”
Fourth, think big. “Imagine a 21st-century fountain. Imagine a way for water and people to flow down to the lakefront. Imagine making this space more vertical, with gardens growing up the bluff in a riot of color… What would it take to get everyone who looks down on the park, people who live and work nearby, to linger in Juneau Park? We won’t know until we blow it up and start all over.”
Cost is always an issue. But as the Milwaukee Art Museum proved with its Calatrava addition, people in this city can get excited about a great idea. They might get just as enthused about a park that, after all, overlooks the Calatrava. What a dramatic green space this could become.
