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Eden Health District CEO
Dev Mahadevan
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EDEN HEALTH DISTRICT
Alameda County elected officials and two East Bay assemblymembers have asserted for the past year that the Eden Health District no longer provides health care grants for its central county residents and should be dissolved.
Eden Health District CEO Dev Mahadevan, though, claims elected officials merely want the jurisdiction’s holdings, including millions in land assets and revenue derived from medical offices it operates.
Following a public hearing last week in Castro Valley over the question of the Eden Health District’s future, Mahadevan said the elected health care board of directors finds it difficult to trust local officials when some of them have specifically stated their real intention for dismantling the district is a sole desire for its assets.
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Assemblymember Rob Bonta |
Mahadevan said Assemblymembers Rob Bonta and Bill Quirk have both made candid remarks to him suggesting their public reasons for the district’s dissolution–the fact it no longer oversees a hospital and that its budget is top-heavy in administrative costs and not health care services–is not true and they instead, want its assets
According to Mahadevan, he questioned Bonta about the reasons for legislation he drafted last year to restrict the district’s operating budget. “This is my third attempt to get money from you,” Bonta reportedly told Mahadevan.
Mahadevan said he was surprised by Bonta’s response, thinking to himself, “Excuse me. Who’s working for who here?”
Later, when Mahadevan pressed Quirk about the issue of dissolution, the Hayward assemblymember brushed off the discussion and said, “I just know you should go away and just give the money,” according to Mahadevan. Quirk’s office did not respond for comment, as of Friday evening.
“That’s his view, my approach has always been simple,” said Bonta. “I want the Eden Health District to actually provide health care. What they’re doing now is spinning their wheels and paying an inflated salary to their CEO.” Mahadevan earned $137,726 in salary and benefits in 2015.
“He’s in full denial mode,” said Bonta. “Hearing him resist it and fight back defies credulity. They’re basically a real estate company, a for-profit business endeavor that does not provide health care.”
Bonta’s legislation last year was specifically tailored for the Eden Health District (formerly called the Eden Township Healthcare District) and requires an 80-20 split of its operating revenue between health care-related grants and services and administrative costs. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law last fall. Quirk also authored a bill last year that was far more punitive and would have immediately dissolved the district. That bill was shelved by Quirk in favor of Bonta’s legislation.
Along with Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan, the mayors of Hayward and San Leandro have called for the Eden Health District to pay more toward health care services, for instance, further subsidizing operations at San Leandro Hospital, which is currently operated by Alameda Health System.
Eden Health District officials, counter saying their unsuccessful lawsuit against Sutter Health helped keep San Leandro Hospital from ceasing operations as a full-service facility with an emergency room. Its decision to sue Sutter was encouraged by Chan and other public officials at the time. In the end, Sutter Health transferred ownership of the facility to Alameda Health System. In addition, the Eden Health District pays Sutter Health $2 million annual over the next 10 years for damages, an outlay Eden Health District officials say has greatly hindered its grant funding ability. The district does not derive any revenue from property taxes.
In December, the Eden Health District Board of Directors approved a total of $250,000 in grants to local health non-profits. In addition, Mahadevan said the district considers the medical offices it owns as health care-related services to the public, and therefore, is a community service that complies with state law.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Bonta.
Mahadevan added, “They don’t know what compliance is,” he said of Bonta and his assembly district staff. Directing his comments to Bonta, Mahadevan said, “Tell me the last time you generated revenue and paid for something? I’ve been responsible [as a former health care executive] for 1,200 people and all of their families and their salaries. When did you ever do that? You just tax the bloody things and pass it on.”
Bonta acknowledged his legislation does not include a method for punishing the district if it does not comply with its restrictions. But with the matter of its dissolution currently being discussed by the Alameda County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), the district’s non-compliance could be an argument used for its unwinding, said Bonta. “We can go to LAFCO and argue he’s violating California law and maybe we should dissolve them.”
Did Dev mention that the hospital where he served as an executive (and looked after 1,200 employees) went bankrupt?
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By MW:
Related to my previous post, that brings up the question as to why such an extremely high percentage of lawyers are total scumbags and complete sleazeballs.
While there are various items that could be mentioned in regard to that, and including that lawyers have far and away the highest rates of alcoholism and drug addiction of any major profession, and related to that, and as one person brought up, “IT IS A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME TRYING TO REASON WITH A DRUG ADDICT,” however one thing that is not normally mentioned, but is extremely relevant, is that lawyers (or more specifically law school students, in other words future lawyers) are brainwashed in law school into thinking that lawyers are always right.
So therefore if a lawyer gets in a debate with a layman, the lawyer automatically assumes his statements and positions are correct, and regardless of how totally and completely they are founded on lies, garbage, and nonsense.
In fact some years ago I read a particular book on negotiating techniques. However the author stated that the methods he had included to make the other side realize that it was in its interest to negotiate and compromise would not work on lawyers, since he said that lawyers were brainwashed in law school into thinking that they were always right.
And of course often lawyers make a lot more money by being complete jerks and totally unreasonable, since that way they make little cases into monstrous cases, and that way get to bill tons of hours.
For instance a few weeks ago I read about a person who had been nicked by a needle in the parking lot of a major department store chain. So the victim, and who was afraid the needle might have possibly been contaminated with AIDS, underwent various medical tests and therapies. Her husband also took some time off from work taking care of her.
The total amount in medical expenses and lost wages of herself and her husband was twelve thousand dollars, and that is the amount she asked the department store to reimburse her.
However the department store, or more likely its lawyers, decided to play hardball and be a total jerk, and therefore refused to reimburse her expenses.
So rather than settling out of court, it turned into a formal court battle, and with damages awarded against the department store of over four million dollars, and with certainly at least tens of millions of dollars additional in negative publicity.
While the department store chain lost extremely big by being totally unreasonable and acting like a complete jerk, however some of its lawyers and/or law firms probably got to bill at least tens of thousands of dollars, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars, by turning a tiny case into a huge monster.
And that is fairly common conduct with lawyers, since the majority of them are parasites, scumbags, scam artists, and bloodsucking leeches.
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By MW:
Rob Bonta is a liberal and also a member of the Demagogue Party. So obviously on that basis alone it would be both ridiculous and outrageous for anyone to challenge his sincerity or honesty.
Furthermore, he is also a lawyer, and in fact a lawyer in good standing with the California State Bar, in other words that totally corrupt organization which pretends to enforce and uphold standards for California's lawyers.
And certainly, and even without the “monitoring” of the CSB, no lawyer would ever act like a weasel, do anything dishonest, be unethical, or try to pull anything.
Still furthermore, he is also a graduate of Yale University, and which is one of the “top twelve” colleges and universities for producing weasels, embezzlers, money launderers, scam artists, white collar criminals, bloodsucking leeches, and crooked lawyers.
{NOTE: The “top five” are Hastings Law School, Harvard, NYU, Georgetown, and Stanford. Fordham is number six, Brandeis and the University of Michigan are tied for the seven and eight spots, and the rest of the “top twelve” are the U of Virginia Law School, Columbia, Yale, and UC Berserkely. Hastings is only a law school, and of the rest, the U of Virginia is the only one that seems to only have its law school totally dedicated to sleaziness. In other words for such institutions as Harvard, Georgetown, UC Berserkeley, Columbia, and Yale, etc, if your goal is to eventually become a crooked lawyer, it does not seem to matter if you go to that institution's law school or only get a B.A. there. For instance, yesterday I read about a lawyer named “Jeffrey Wertkin,” and who offered to help fix a case in exchange for a 300K bribe. (If you type in his name and do an Internet search, a lot of articles will come up about that.) And Wertkin is not only a Georgetown graduate, but even also was on its faculty. In fact, after reading about what Wertkin tried to pull, I would have been fairly surprised if he had not been a graduate of one of the “top five,” since I have found that the majority of the very sleaziest lawyers are, and virtually all of them are graduates of the “top twelve.” So after reading about what Wertkin tried to pull, I did a tiny bit of research on him, and found that, and not surprisingly, he had an association with Georgetown.}
So I think I have “proved” that we can totally trust Bonta.
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