The best term for it is blackmail.  Anyone who has read the blog for a while knows about the methods San Bernardino County Arrowhead Regional Medical Center (ARMC) Medical Director Dr. Dev GnanaDev uses to control the Board of Supervisors.  He does whatever it takes to assure he always has at least three votes on the Board of Supervisors.  Whether it is campaign contributions or free medical care, Dr. GnanaDev secures his position and controls the voting habits of the Board of Supervisors.

But Dr. GnanaDev is not the only employee at ARMC where less than ethical means are used to control others.  I witnessed it first-hand when I worked at ARMC for a year.

I know now that I was sent to work at ARMC by Mark Uffer so I could be watched.  The problem with that is that the person who was assigned to watch me had more skeletons in his closet than just about anyone I have worked with in thirty years of county employment.  That person was Fred Mendoza, PMQ/Insurance Verification Department Manager.

PMQ/Insurance Verification is the department at ARMC that attempts to get ARMC reimbursed for services rendered, especially for indigent patients and illegal aliens.  During the year I was there I am told the department brought in about $12.9 million for the hospital—a substantial sum—but hardly any where close to the amount that it could have brought in had there been decent management.  But Fred, like so many other hospital employees, was protected by Dr. GnanaDev.

I have never worked for a manager so afraid of his own shadow as Fred Mendoza.  Everything made him nervous and I quickly learned why.  As I said, there were A LOT of skeletons in his closet.

First and foremost, incompetency among Fred’s employees was losing the hospital millions of dollars that could otherwise be collected.  I’ve written before about the single employee who refused to do her job for YEARS.  Because much of the money that would have been received from MediCal, Medicare, and private insurance would have gone to the Department of Behavioral Health instead of ARMC, she was allowed to get away from it.  When I was asked to help clean up her mess, I found insurance billings that went back to 2006 (this was 2009) that have never been processed.  Literally, tens of millions of dollars worth of services had been given to patients and their insurance companies and/or MediCal/Medicare had never been billed and it was too late to do so.  The bills had to be written off.

The female employees in PMQ wore the tightest, lowest cut clothes, often with their middrifts showing, and that kept their boss happy and themselves protected.  If you didn’t do that, then you found yourself  stuck up in the DBH unit where Fred didn’t have to look at you because he couldn’t handle anything but his cute little chickadees down where his office was.  Since PMQ employees often had to visit patients in their rooms, I can only imagine what patients thought of the tattooed breasts and backsides showing, not to mention flip flops, popping bubbles with their gum, addressing 80 year olds by their first name, and discussing their sex lives and drug use for everyone to hear.

Why did he allow this to go on?  Because he was so busy doing sexual things on the job, and everyone knew he was doing them.  He was terrified of being found out by the wrong person.  I personally witnessed him do some VERY inappropriate things at work and say some VERY inappropriate things to female employees.  I met with Andrew Lamberto and Bob Windle about it, and of course, not a thing was done.  Fred was protected.

Fred wanted me to document the employee who was responsible for not getting the insurance claims processed.  She was a clerk and I was an Employment Services Specialist, which meant I was not a supervisor nor was I in her chain of command.  I explained to him repeatedly that I was more than willing to help him, but he had to be the one to actually discipline her.  He kept claiming that Human Resources told him that nothing could be done because she was black, old, and disabled.  When he pushed me to build a jacket on her, I suggested we make an appointment with Christine Desko and explain the situation to her.  Of course Fred would not do so, because he knew the subject of what this employee had on him would come up. As I said, blackmail is the best term so Fred was protected.

Then there were the “strings” Fred would pull for illegal aliens to get them care that citizens would not get.  He would always say, “What if it was your mother?”  And I understand.  But the law is the law.  In my job I talked to patients every day that needed surgery to say, save their sight, but could not get it because they did not have insurance.  And they were American citizens.  So, yes, I have a problem with what he did for illegals, especially when it was in fact illegal.

A while back I received an anonymous email from an ARMC employee about illegal drug use among PMQ employees.  I forwarded that email to County Administrative Officer Greg Devereaux, and as with everything else with ARMC, I know nothing got done.   But if PMQ was staffed by professional employees who wanted to work and save the sex and drugs for after hours, perhaps the county would be millions less in the hole.  But that, as we are finding out, is too much to ask.  It’s not their money being wasted.  And it is millions and millions of dollars, but no one cares.