Florida denied disabled children care, while wasting money on PR
NICA, the Florida program that underwrites care for the state’s severely disabled children, needs to get its priorities straight, once and for all.
What shouldn’t be on the list? Hiring a PR firm to do crisis control.
We already knew, from a series of stories published this year by the Miami Herald and ProPublica, that Florida’s Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, needed serious changes. It had frequently denied or delayed payment to parents for medical care and services for their children — even though the state-sponsored program had amassed about $1.5 billion in assets, a gargantuan sum.
After those stories were published, lawmakers rightly became outraged and demanded an overhaul of the program. The entire NICA governing board resigned, along with its executive director. The Legislature passed reforms this year that increased financial benefits to families, set up an appeals process for denied claims and added a NICA parent to the governing board, among other vitally important changes. The Legislature did the right thing in tackling the issue.
‘Court of public opinion’
But now we learn, from yet another story the Herald published, that NICA spent $200,000 in 2019 to hire a public relations firm in a two-year effort to change public perception of the program after the Herald began investigating it.
That’s $200,000 on PR — even as NICA was rejecting parents’ requests for wheelchairs, therapies and in-home nursing for their seriously disabled kids.
Wow. We bet the families of the disabled children in the program can think of some better uses for that chunk of change.
NICA is a program created by the Legislature in 1988 to protect doctors from medical-malpractice lawsuits by limiting compensation for children born with catastrophic brain damage. When families enter the program, they give up the right to sue doctors or hospitals over their child’s injuries. In exchange, they are promised “medically necessary” and “reasonable” healthcare for their children. The program is sustained by fees paid by doctors and hospitals that benefit from the ban on lawsuits.
But administrators often spent more money fighting families than providing care, as the Herald/ProPublica investigation found. So the decision to hire a PR firm, Sachs Media, strikes us as particularly self-serving.
An email from a Sachs executive vice president to the program makes it pretty clear what the impetus was, noting that the Herald had been “conducting an investigation into NICA for several months, submitting numerous requests for public records and interviews” and discussing “a path forward to win in the court of public opinion and to protect your mission and the future of the organization.”
NICA lost focus
The PR company says it accomplished a lot of good, improving NICA’s website, helping leaders communicate better and championing a key reform in the Legislature to increase the initial payment to parents from $100,000 to $250,000. We don’t doubt that those were helpful measures.
But what we do question — and that’s the polite way of saying it — is a program that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on PR when its job is to pay for healthcare for some of the state’s most vulnerable children. This is an organization that had lost sight of its core mission.
NICA has been overhauled, and the PR contract is ending as the year comes to a close. Good.
We hope the people now running the program will take this moment to reset priorities. If the program is serious about repairing its damaged image, it has to do one thing: Help the families of disabled kids. Do that well, and the PR will take care of itself.
This editorial reflects the opinion of the Miami Herald Editorial Board.