YOLLICK Facebook Comments reveal that Courier reporter Catherine Dominguez has a personal axe to grind with the the man responsible for the Golden Hammer awards.
Yesterdays round in the ongoing campaign mounted by Andy Dubois’ Courier had Reporter Catherine Dominguez dredging up a five year old news story as a pretense for Courier favored establishment to strike back at popular local government critic Eric Yollick and his criticism of County Attorney JD Lambright the current holder of the record for Highest paid elected official in Texas.
In the comments section of that story Yollick engaged with other readers and revealed that Catherine Dominguez was caught in the fallout of spending cut he implemented along with the Hospital District Board on which he served in 2006. An excerpt of the comments are reproduced below.
In my first board meeting, I moved to cut spending by $5 million per year (more than 20% of the entire budget). The first employee who was fired as a result was none other than Catherine Clover Dominguez, the lady who wrote the hit piece article to which these comments are appended. I suppose that raises a question about Ms. Dominguez’s conflict of interests and objectivity. What is she doing writing this story along with her buddy JD Lambright?
At the MCHD, we increased employee compensation for the lower level employees, because they were not getting adequate compensation. Only the “political class” at the top was receiving high salaries. We fixed that.
I don’t remember all of the frills but I do remember three major changes we made. First, we cut the Community Relations Department because it was just a propaganda office to make the voters believe that MCHD was doing more than it was doing. Second, we eliminated the mobile medical clinics. We were spending $2 million per year on clinics that treated about 30 patients a year countywide. It was a disgusting waste of money and a boondoggle for physicians. Third, and the biggest savings of all, we stopped paying full retail prices for oncology drugs when the doctors sold them to us. Several doctors were marking up oncology drugs as much as 700% before they used them on MCHD patients. I remember a very direct and tense meeting with those doctors where I looked them in the eye, told them that was unethical, and told them I believed the board would vote to stop that at our next meeting. We did. That saved the District several million dollars per year. We paid Medicaid reimbursement amounts on oncology drugs just like most other hospital districts throughout Texas during the remaining period when I served on the board.
