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Dear Sharon, IEPolitcs came recommended to me as a possible way to shut down a boondoggle of a project perpetrated on us my our Board of Supervisors. They plan on widening the road on which we live. It is Summit Valley Road, it connects Hesperia to the I-15 via a very winding road called State Hwy 138. They intend to use eminent domain and steal property to make Summit Valley Road a 4 lane expressway, which will dump into a two lane very winding 138. They have had the meetings and told us to our face that this project is 5 to 7 years off, but we found out today that it is very close to going into the construction phase. I am so sick of lying politicians. There must be some recourse to make them accountable to their constituencies. I would be eternally grateful for any help you could provide. Thank you. Debra Hennington Weisser
Investigators Looking Into Arrowhead Regional’s Operations
Allegations of malpractice, licensing shortcomings, operational and managerial miscues and substandard accounting practices at the county hospital are the focus of separate inquiries by federal and state agencies, the Sentinel has learned.
The Sentinel was unable to ascertain whether a rumored survey of the hospital’s operations by auditors working at the behest of the board of supervisors is actually underway.
The issues being looked into include current practices as well as those extending back nearly a decade at the Colton-based facility, which is known as the Arrowhead Regional Medical Center.
The sharpest focus is that on the administrative action of Dev GnanaDev, who is both the current medical director of Arrowhead Regional as well as its head of surgery. GnanaDev also happens to be the president of the California Medical Association.
Some of the suspected problems at the hospital originated at a level well below that of GnanaDev and involved several instances of medical malpractice and faulty diagnoses. Others have been attributed to GnanaDev directly.
One known case, the Sentinel is informed, elicited the interest of federal investigators and involved a thirteen year old girl who had suffered a dislocated neck. Physicians and staff failed to adequately recognize or diagnose the condition, resulting in the child becoming permanently paralyzed. The medical staff further stands accused of having lied to the parents about the situation.
Questions have been raised as well about non-medical issues, specifically fiduciary ones in the hospital’s operations. One area under examination is billing and potential fraud with regard to descriptions of services rendered and billing procedure. Another pertains to a major conflict of interest GnanaDev is said to have participated in under the authority of former county administrative officer Mark Uffer. Uffer signed off on GnanaDev negotiating with his own medical group, Arrowhead Regional Surgical Group, Inc., for the provision of services to the county hospital. Uffer was the director of Arrowhead Regional prior to his 2004 elevation to the post of county administrative officer.
GnanaDev’s apparent conflict of interest has resulted in the manifestation of specific problems at the medical center which have gone unredressed.
In December, the Center For Medicare Services launched an investigation, the Sentinel has learned, on the strength of a call to the state of California about shortcomings in the care of a patent. And while no final report of that accreditation body’s inquiry has been delivered, it is known that the investigators were notified there had not been peer review with regard to some practices and that a free discussion of treatment modalities and protocols had been discouraged by GnanaDev.
You shouldn’t hide things,” said one hospital employee. “If you bring it out and you take corrective action you’re okay. Some don’t want to be embarrassed, so nothing is done to change or fix things. It is now catching up with them.”
Furthermore, GnanaDev’s comportment has come under question with regard to a situation in which another surgical service provider wrote a complaint about the Arrowhead Regional Surgical Group’s activities. GnanaDev’s reaction, according to one well placed source, was to threaten to cancel the contract of the complaining entity. Specifics with regard to this incident, the Sentinel was told, were kept from the board of supervisors.
At one point, a hospital employee, concerned that GnanaDev’s dual role as head of surgery and medical director represented a circumstance under which the issue could not be dealt with in a forthright manner, approached the hospital’s director, Patrick Petre.
“Patrick, who doesn’t like confrontation and is afraid of Dev, ignored it,” a source employed at the hospital told the Sentinel. “Later on, he [Petre] said he never heard about it.”
Another hospital employee explained the issue thusly: “GnanaDev controls Arrowhead Surgical Services. He runs it and operates it. Theoretically he reports to himself and he negotiated his own contract.”
The Arrowhead Community Surgical Group’s contract, a copy of which has been obtained by the Sentinel, designates the group as the provider of the directors of some of the hospital’s departments, including general surgery, including trauma, otolaryngology, burn surgery, oral surgery, neurological surgery, plastic surgery, opthalmologic surgery and transplant surgery.
According to employees at the medical center, other administrators and higher-ups there have engaged in questionable practices.
A scandal that is looming just below the surface of public consciousness, one employee, said, consists of inadequate supervision and oversight in the emergency room.
It has been said that chief financial officer Frank Arambla has been using non-medical criteria in dictating the hospital’s emergency room admissions policy.
“The CFO has been telling the emergency room doctors which patients to admit and which ones they can’t,” said one employee.
“Residents are running the emergency room,” said another employee. “They are letting physician assistants do whatever they want. The nurses are up in arms.”
Allegations of mis- and malfeasance in the department of behavioral health have also surfaced. Specifically, patients, who by law are not to be kept in restraints for more than six hours, were in some cases physically immobilized by straps or other bindings for as long as four months, the Sentinel has been told. These restraints were maintained even while the patients were eating and showering. In some cases, after family members lodged a complaint the restraints were removed. In other cases, where no family members were present to take note of the practice and even in some cases where family members did, the restraints were not removed.
“Some patients were tied to a bed for months on end,” one employee at the medical center told the Sentinel. “It’s like an image out of a horror movie.”
Guillermo Valenzuela, the medical center’s associate medical director and the president of the county medical society and chairman of the women’s health division, and Rodney Borger, the chairman of the county medical society, were derided by some medical center employees as having been too subservient to GnanaDev. It is known that both Valenzuela and Borger recently approached supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt and sought to reassure him about the sufficiency of operations at the hospital, arguing that there is no need for substantial changes in the way the facility is being run.
Valenzuela is a registered lobbyist and there have been reports of irregularities in the methods GnanaDev and those in his orbit have utilized in seeking to keep the county board of supervisors from bringing its authority to bear to change policies at the hospital.
Two county hospital employees told the Sentinel that GnanaDev has made a practice of directing those with whom he is professionally associated to put up money, which he then forwards to the electioneering funds of various supervisors in an effort to curry favor with them.
A recurrent report from those working at the hospital is that at least three of the members of the board of supervisors as well as members of their staffs and families have been provided with medical care at the medical center to which they were not entitled.
“I can tell you there were some county VIPs who were given treatment at the hospital they were not supposed to get,” said one employee. “Because of who they were – members of the board or their people – they were moved to the front of the line. They were never billed or the bills disappeared. This was improper because this was outside the scope of the medical plan and the mission of the hospital to provide quality care for all citizens regardless of their ability to pay. I know at one time hospital staff was talking about a clinic that was to be devoted to county employees.”
The provision of the free medical service to members of the board of supervisors, the Sentinel was told, appeared to be one means by which GnanaDev had prevented the board from holding GnanaDev and other administrators at the hospital accountable for their actions.
“That free medical care to the supervisors was not reported on their [California Form] 700s,” a hospital employee said.
California Form 700s are statements of economic interest that must be filled out by California public officials, including those in elective office. The hospital employee suggested that the failure of the county supervisors who had received medical care at the county hospital to disclose that free care on their Form 700s provided GnanaDev with blackmail material by which the medical center’s officials were able to limit a critical evaluation of the medical center’s function.
On the non-medical end, there is overwhelming evidence that billing for services at the hospital was done improperly. In one of the divisions at the hospital, billings were delayed for over two years. This was hugely problematic, since most insurance companies do not accept bills that are more than two months delinquent and Medicare will not accept billings that are more than one year old.
“This came about because someone wasn’t doing the work that was supposed to get done,” a county hospital employee said. “At one point there was two years’ worth of work that had just piled up. At that point it was too late to bill the insurance companies and too late to bill Medicare or Medical. In some cases they did bill the patients.”
When one county employee assigned to tracking certain phases of the hospital’s billing set to work on that assignment, in fewer than seven hours she found over $1 million worth of services to patients to whom no bills for service had been posted. In scores of cases, billings for operating room services went out in a way that only one of every four units was posted. An unofficial internal tally of operations showed that in one year there was a $10 million shortfall in operating room billing.
The same informal audit of the hospital’s operations turned up fraud or lack of follow-through in the 1011 program, through which the county seeks reimbursement for services rendered to illegal aliens.
There were reports in late February that the board of supervisors was considering bringing in a consultant to examine the medical center’s operations. The Sentinel, however was unable to confirm that such an effort was ongoing.
The examination of the hospital’s operations by the Health Care Facilities Accreditation Program run by the American Osteopathic Association, the Center for Medicare Services or federal investigators could result in the medical center losing its accreditation, meaning the hospital would no longer be eligible to care for Medicare patients.
At press time, the Sentinel’s efforts to reach Petre and GnanaDev at the medical center were not successful.
anyway to feature a story about office assistant II working our of their job scope and getting reclassified.
Thank you for keeping this site open, The residents of San Bernardino County need to know the real story behind the story.
What happened to my good Face Book neighbor? You are suddenly gone. I miss you!.
Ten years ago in the course of my employment at County Counsel a Board agenda item happened to cross my desk. It was for approval of a redesign to the street I happened to live on. I was shocked to see that it was at the final stage of approval but I was unaware of it. I took it to the then assistant County Counsel who assured me that this unethical/illegal action by the county, driven by a neighbor/county employee, was not the way the county operated. I replied that it never crossed my mind that it was other than a mistake. Zoom to ten years later . . . could I have been any more naive?
Sharon,
Wondering if you could please add Pat Meagher ( political campaign website ) running in the 41st against Jerry Lewis. His website is
patmeagherforcongress.com
We have quite a following of republicans, dems and independents, We are in it to win it, and retire Jerry Lewis so he can spend more time with his bride,
How about it?
curious why you are not posting, following sb lobbyists fined by AG cuomo in NY? sort of works with local pension scandal.
Please invistage. Larry Walkers connection to Certna. And also Patric Honey’s ties to Certna and how he is not a county employee but is still recieving benefits and also their ties to Jason Anderson the new DISM.
What about the Anderson-Ovitt-Devereaux Ontario executive club connection? The feds need to fry all these guys for their public contracting ineptness, taking advantage of conflicted interests by misappropriating public funds into their own fat wallets. Jason, you’re the attorney right, would you advise that this kind of racketeering can only be combated against by filing a RICO lawsuit? Any comment Jason? Gary? Gregory? Go ahead, let your attorneys do the talking (the silence is deafening), only one problem with the County. It’s not like Ontario where you can sic Best, Best and Krieger (BB&K) on anyone you like. Now you have to use in-house counsel at the County, and a retired figure skater at that! I hear Gregory was a dancer in college at WVU, maybe he and the new County Counselor can be the first same sex pair figure skaters in the next Winter Olympics. Devereaux/ Basle skating for Team USA or France/Canada? Friken socialists or in dictator CAO Devilreaux’s case, a full blown communist!
Sorry Devil, I meant CEO.
Bosacki is thinking about running for our HOA board. We have a very diverse population. Please advise – why do you think he’s a bigot & racist? We are not in SB county or Hesperia so do not know much about him.
Pre-selection in WDD. They have created another Deputy Director position and word on the street it is for ‘Nick Demartz” Should be interesting!
This is my first time reading this blog. This is the most vulger, hateful, nasty, rumor mongering bunch of lies, half truths, misinformation and outright BS I’ve ever read. People from the Sheriff’s Department who post on this site must be the unhappiest people on earth. If I felt this bad about a place I worked and got paid good money with good benefits I’d shut up, get happy or quit. You are a disgusting bunch on individuals and I am said to say I believe people as hateful as you should not be on the public payroll.
Any information on the blog that you would specifically like to correct, Bogie47?
Yep. Demartz got it! Isn’t it odd how EDA/RDA/WDD keeps promoting their people as they are simultaneously trying to cut positions from CDH whilst draining their coffers? Hmm?
Just last week they canned the CDH Director Mitch Slagerman. Must have been something he said that Pat Cole (the troll) didn’t like much.
Not everyone is an unhappy Sheriff’s Department employee. A lot of people just refuse to get involved in the ugliness. Please believe, a LOT of people are still out there fighting for the greater good.
I wonder what the County FD’s policy is regarding carrying of spouses in County Vehicles? BC133 was involved in that accident on SR189 with the Korean Church bus this afternoon, and it was reported that the Battalion Chief’s wife was injured.
This website should be shutdown
SBSO Deputies Covering up for their self and their fellow “brother” in order to get away with a crimes they have committed, This is corruption.
1). Not arresting a fellow “brother” when he is the perpetrator of the crime is… corruption. (ANY crime)
2). lying and changing a victims statement on police report(s) to cover for their “brother” is… corruption.
3). conspiring with fellow “brothers” to lie in their and your statements as part of an investigation (that you are in charge of by the way),that is against your fellow “brother” in order for him to get away with it and to allow your “brother” to get out of the consequences
( termination, jail time and restitution) for his own actions ( criminal ).is…corruption.
4). lying about the law, to a victim of a crime to prevent the victim from filing a police report and pressing charges on a fellow “brother” who is the perpetrator is… corruption,
5). verbally threatening a victim, reminding them of your “position” of power and your major county “connections” who will enable ( a favor owed or a favor needed and will give one back some day in return) what ever actions you want to use on that victim to “show” the victim whose got the power is… corruption,
6). and when “that” same victim still insist on a police report of the crimes, which are being perpetrated by law enforcement officers despite the ongoing verbal threats of “whats to come if they proceed” and don’t “stop perusing this” and that law enforcement officer(s) actually put those threats into action is………….. corruption. Its a crime!!!!
Can some one get help with bringing those corrupt law enforcement officers to be held accountable for their actions, what and who ever they may be? lets start with going back to the small things now per say. okay, is the person going to be terminated or have they been terminated for getting rid of Mr. Cochran’s domestic violence report that was reported on your blog “IF” this is true about Mr. Cochran. Everyone who knew had an obligation to report it, and if they didn’t they were aiding and abetting, a crime and should be held accountable. Is the blog going to make sure they get whats coming to them per say? Like not letting it die until….
If any law enforcement officer commits forgery, or theft, or perjury and the officer who arrives to take a police report for the victim and it turns out the perpetrator is one of their fellow “brothers” DO YOUR JOB!!!! IF that officer chooses to lie, covers up, and wont do a thorough report and forward it to the DA in the effort to help his fellow “brother”, Terminate that officer!!! That officer is corrupt!!!
AND, any other officer who has knowledge of the reporting officer decision to “help” his fellow “brother” by covering up for the fellow “brother”, terminate that CRIMINAL AS WELL!!!!!!!!! If you cannot hold up the law under God (Christian) for bias conduct get another career you SINNER!! You are violating legal rights of innocent people and committing crimes, you belong in jail and I hope this blog helps me put you there!!!! God sees ALL!!!!!!!
Especially those claiming to be Christians!!, did you hear me?, Mr. Mrs./Ms. Christian Law Enforcement Officer!! Im calling YOU out!!
It is not IF, it is WHEN your life, family, and most important to you, (your “God”) your career all comes crashing down. ( for the non Christian as well) Stop now and repent, and go to the one(s) who were hurt by YOUR corruption (SIN) and ask for forgiveness and then go FIX everything that YOU did to them, today!! Amen.
You should check into Deputy Reserver Tommy Ramos and how he came to be a Deputy. He greased former Sheriff Penrod with some campaign money and was then Deputized. This was and still may be against the departments policy.
I hear a retired captain is going to run
Tommy any relation to Mikey or James?
I just found out recently about something that apparently happened a while ago at PID that does not quite seem kosher. How is it that the Supervising Office Specilaist retired, and the husband of another supervisor there was moved into that spot, without the job being posted? And how can Lugo’s son in law work there at all? Isn’t he in her direct line of supervision?
Recently, the website is loading slow on my computer. I think it is the new links that you have put up that are causing it! Is anybody else having the same problems?
I noticed it too. Seems to have to do with the Twitter feed. But now it seems better. Let me know if you continue to have problems.
I am writing for your help on information concerning the Devore Animal Shelter of San Bernardino County. I have come across news articles about recent protests at the shelter as recent as November 12, 2011. I want to attend the next planned protest at the shelter site, and want to be able to communicate with the organizers and anyone willing to give me valid information on the stats for the shelters euthanasia numbers and any information that would help shed the spot light on the practices of this place regarding the treatment and handling of the animals there.