Taxpayers renovate Jackson Health and UM’s organ transplant hub in $78 million makeover
The taxpayer-financed building boom continues at Jackson Health System.
Jackson Health’s citizen advisory committee, which reviews the spending of the $830 million bond approved by Miami-Dade County taxpayers in 2013, gave its unanimous blessing on Friday morning for a $1.5 million jolt of bond proceeds to renovate and expand the Miami Transplant Institute. The organ transplant institute is coming off a record-breaking 2019, performing more transplants than any other facility in the country.
That $1.5 million is just the topper on a $78.5 million renovation and expansion of the intensive care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Diagnostic Testing Center, which houses the transplant institute in partnership with University of Miami Health System, or UHealth. The vast majority of funds come from the 2013 “miracle bond” issue, with Jackson kicking in $3.8 million from its own capital funds.
Jackson Health, the safety-net hospital system for Miami-Dade, receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to help offset the cost of providing care for the bulk of the county’s uninsured and under-insured patients, as well as its jail inmates.
The money for Miami’s transplant institute comes after the facility performed 747 procedures last year. The upgrade for the Diagnostic Testing Center means adding a three-story vertical expansion to the building. Two floors would be outfitted with 54 ICU beds, and the third would be built as a shell for future intensive care growth. The project would also include visitor lounges, nursing administration offices, staff support areas and a pharmacy.
The citizens’ advisory board, made up of financial consultants, developers, healthcare professionals and others, doesn’t approve or reject spending — that’s up to the Public Health Trust — but the committee can recommend for or against funding projects. A Jackson Health spokesman said the committee has never recommended against a project.
Untapped bond money is running low. The health trust has approved the spending of about $724 million of the $830 million, with about $541.5 million of that already spent, according to a January update.
Growing the transplant center reflects Jackson’s new strategy of rebranding itself as a destination for patients who have the means to pay for their own procedures. The health system has projected that the growth of its transplant and cardiac surgery programs — both of which draw more insured patients and yield higher revenues — will drive the demand for more ICU beds.
Jackson leaders believe that more paying patients who need services like transplants and rehabilitation therapy will help to subsidize the health system’s core mission of serving the city’s poor.
And while the rebranding effort has accelerated in recent years, thanks to those hundreds of millions of bond dollars, taxpayers are also contributing more than ever to Jackson’s bottom line outside of that revenue source. The $2.3 billion fiscal year 2020 budget is propped up by a projected $490 million in non-bond-related annual subsidies from Miami-Dade taxpayers.
This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 12:18 PM.
