(Host) Governor Elect Jim Douglas says he believes the Dean Administration should have done a better job keeping track of the Fletcher Allen Hospital expansion project. Fletcher Allen recently disclosed that the cost of their project is going to be almost double the original estimate of $173 million dollars and there are indications that some Hospital officials deliberately misled the state’s review process about the true cost of the project.
Several investigations have been launched to determine if any Fletcher Allen officials should be held criminally responsible for the cost over run. Speaking last night on VPR’s Switchboard program, Douglas said the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration, or BISHCA, needs to understand its role in this situation:
(Douglas) “There was some information submitted to BISHCA, I’m told, that perhaps should have led someone there to ask more questions. The long term capital plan of Fletcher Allen has been submitted to the Department for some time and so this shouldn’t have been a surprise to somebody at that Department. I want to be sure that after assuming the responsibility for leading state government next year that my commissioner of that department determines what happened, why these questions weren’t asked, and institute some practices to do whatever we can to prevent it from happening again.”
(Host) Douglas says he doesn’t favor a new state bureaucracy to review large health care projects because he thinks the current system can still work well with some minor changes.