Mike Smith, a former secretary of the Vermont Agency of Human Services, has accused University of Vermont Health Network’s board of trustees of a “failure of leadership at the highest level” for giving out bonuses and pay raises while cutting patient services.
In a pointed letter obtained by VTDigger, Smith, who led the Vermont Agency of Human Services under governors Phil Scott and Jim Douglas, wrote Tuesday that he and other community members were “quickly losing confidence in the Board and chief executive” for those decisions.
While praising practitioners and frontline staff, Smith wrote that he worried “that the Board has confused its duty of care and put the best interests of the corporate machine and its leaders above the best interests of the organization’s true mission: the care of its patients, employees, hospitals, and the community it serves.”
The letter, which was sent to the network’s board of trustees, lawmakers, and high-ranking state officials including Gov. Phil Scott, adds to a stream of recent criticism leveled at the health network.
Last fall, network leaders announced sweeping cuts to clinical services, including shuttering an inpatient psychiatric unit at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, cutting the census at UVM Medical Center in Burlington and closing clinics in the Mad River Valley.
The network has blamed those cuts on the Green Mountain Care Board, a key health care regulator, which capped how much the network’s hospitals could make in patient revenue and ordered UVM Medical Center to decrease its commercial insurance rates by one percent.
Since then, however, a growing chorus of unions, patients, advocates and lawmakers has criticized the network for diminishing services that Vermonters rely on. The revelation that network executives accepted $3 million in bonuses around the same time that the cuts were announced has only sharpened those critiques.
Smith’s letter was addressed to the governor, the chairs of the legislative health care committees and the Green Mountain Care Board, Secretary of Human Services Jenney Samuelson and the trustees of the network and its Vermont facilities, which also includes Porter Medical Center in Middlebury.
“There is no question the cost of care is unaffordable for too many Vermonters, and UVM Health Network is committed to working together with our regulator, state and federal leaders and other partners, as well as independently, to identify areas where we can truly make an impact helping people access and afford the care they need,” Annie Mackin, a spokesperson for the UVM Health Network, said in an email to VTDigger.
But she confirmed that senior leadership had in fact received pay raises, as had other network employees.
“The UVM Health Network board’s compensation committee, made up of volunteers from the community who evaluate and set executive compensation based on recommendations from outside consultants, determined that senior leaders would receive an increase for the year,” Mackin said. “Senior leaders’ base pay and total compensation remain below average for similar organizations, and represent 1.08% of payroll.”
She did not respond to a question about how large the leaders’ pay raises were.
In a brief interview Wednesday afternoon, Smith, who has also held leadership roles at the Agency of Administration, Vermont State University, Burlington College, Fairpoint Communications and the Enhanced 911 Board, said that the letter speaks for itself.
“I think it expresses a mood of the state right now, and feelings towards the UVM Health Network,” he said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Mike Smith, former human services secretary, accuses UVM Health Network of a ‘failure of leadership’.