Cook County is the second most populated county in the United States. Brown is the official keeper of records for the roughly 1.2 million cases filed each year. She is responsible for managing an annual operating budget of more than $120 million and a workforce of over 2,300 employees.
Since the health care crisis has been creating so much conversation throughout the nation, rolling out stopped by candidate Brown’s new campaign office to talk about her ideas to improve the health care system in Cook County. –toure muhammad
What are the biggest problems Cook County faces?
We need additional revenues so that we are properly funding Cook County government. We need new ideas, not new taxes. We need to make sure we are funding the health system and unclogging the waiting rooms. People need to be able to seek primary care and not just come to [county hospitals] for emergency care.
There is a national health care crisis. How do you propose to solve this on the county level?
Other states have public aid HMOs and I’d like to have a public aid HMO/PPO. HMOs permit you to go to a specific location. It doesn’t have to be a [county hospital]. A person can be assigned to any HMO and it would be funded and paid for by the state. That would permit us to unclog the [county hospital] waiting rooms and help us have a more efficient health care system. PPO is a preferred physician that allows you to [get care] anywhere. People on public aid should have that same ability to go anywhere and get quality health care. Don’t get me wrong, Cook County has one of the best health care systems in the country, but we must make sure people are not waiting days to [receive care].
What are some ways to generate more income for the county’s health care system?
We need a new patient information system to find out if a person has insurance and if they live in Cook County. If they don’t live in Cook County, then we could do an inter-county chargeback to the county that the person lives in or charge the insurance company. There are a lot of ways that we can raise the funds to run county government, but we need new ideas for that. We need someone with experience, as I have.
Toure Muhammad can be reached at [email protected] or (773) 531-8798.
