The chairman of OC’s health plan for low-income residents suddenly resigned Thursday – the day after a Voice of OC article detailed a state investigation of hiring and pay practices he presided over – especially salary hikes.
OC Supervisor Andrew Do announced he was resigning his board seat at CalOptima during a board meeting Thursday, according to his colleagues. Executives saw huge salary hikes under his leadership, including one that bumped the CEO’s pay up to over $840,000.
The health plan covers hundreds of thousands of low-income residents, including unhoused people.
[Read: Sacramento is Investigating Pay Spikes and Hiring Practices at OC’s Health Plan for the Poor]
Do didn’t return a request for comment. But his county supervisor colleagues confirmed the resignation when reached by late Thursday.
“It was announced at the conclusion of the meeting,” said Supervisor Doug Chaffee, who is on the health plan’s board.
Asked if Do gave a reason, Chaffee said he didn’t “want to speak for him,” adding that Do “has honorably served on the [CalOptima] Board for 8 years.”
By early Friday, CalOptima’s website had been updated to no longer show Do as a board member.
CalOptima is Orange County’s largest health insurer, managing the publicly-funded health coverage of 945,000 low-income children, adults, seniors and people with disabilities.
That’s one in every four residents and one in every three children.
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said his understanding is he will replace Do at CalOptima, but that he should have a solid answer on Friday.
The review by the California State Auditor’s Office comes after CalOptima has increasingly been placed in the hands of Do and one of his top aides.
[Read: Local Politicos Fuel Takeover of Orange County’s Health Plan For the Poor]
The aide, Veronica Carpenter, was hired into a $282,000-per-year top agency position as chief of staff, despite having less than one year of healthcare administration experience.
As CalOptima’s chairman, Do also presided over major pay raises for the agency’s executive positions – including raising the CEO’s maximum base salary from $600,000 to $765,000 in fall 2021.
Under Do’s leadership, the board approved another raise for CEO Michael Hunn in recent months – bumping it up to a maximum pay of just over $840,000 per year, according to an OC Register article.
That’s more than twice the salary of the President of the United States and nearly four times as much as the California Governor makes.
The hiring and pay practices reported by Voice of OC drew concern from Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D-Fullerton), who later requested the state audit of the agency.
“We have administrators in our public agencies making close to $1 million from public tax dollars. [That] to me is something we should be shining a light on,” said Quirk-Silva said in an interview this week.
Do also run into trouble for his handling of contracting at the health plan – facing a $12,000 fine last year for violating “pay to play” laws by using his CalOptima board position to try to push through lobbying contracts for two of his campaign donors – efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful.
CalOptima’s acting chair is now Clayton M. Corwin, the president of a commercial real estate company, according to the agency’s website.
At Thursday’s meeting, CalOptima board members were scheduled to vote on a proposed doubling of the amount the public agency pays its lobbyists in Washington, D.C. – going from $12,500 to $27,000 per month.
The public agenda documents did not mention how much the lobbyists would be paid per hour.
Voice of OC asked for that info in a Wednesday email to CalOptima’s CEO Michael Hunn, spokeswoman Janis Rizzuto and board clerk Sharon Dwiers, but did not receive a response as of early Friday.
Transparency around money – or the lack thereof – is among the areas state auditors are probing at CalOptima.
Nick Gerda covers county government for Voice of OC. You can contact him at ngerda@voiceofoc.org.