Texas Health and Human Services Commission
Privatizing Healthcare to maximize personal profit?
About the Texas Health and Human Services Commission
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20040402005354/http://www.hhsc.state.tx.us/about_hhsc/index.html
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/P1WMW
Gregg Phillips’ Profile
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/XYsPu
Commentary
As HHSC deputy commissioner for program services, Phillips will make key decisions on downsizing and consolidating 12 agencies serving the blind, deaf, nursing home residents, abused children, mentally impaired, physically disabled and other needy Texans into only five agencies.
Phillips also will oversee the privatization of eligibility screening for services to sick and needy Texans as part of a new state law designed to shrink government and save $1.1 billion. Instead of the 800 Mississippi state jobs jeopardized by privatization, Texas aims to eliminate 3,600 health and human services workers during the next two years.
Gregg Phillips, the $144K-per-year "leader of the most sweeping social services overhaul in modern Texas history".
Source: https://www.offthekuff.com/mt/archives/002029.html#002029
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/BlLgl
How much of this reorganization will involve granting of tax credits to companies that hire long-term welfare recipients?
How much business will Enterject, Inc. receive as a result of these changes?
Does Gregg Phillips still have any role with Enterject, Inc.?
Will he immediately start working for Enterject when he eventually leaves his current position?
Is there anyone out there who thinks this is a conflict of interest?
Source: https://www.offthekuff.com/wp/?p=7444&cpage=1
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/4v84g
2004 Houston Chronicle Article
Gregg Phillips and Larry Temple worked together in the mid-1990s in a massive and largely unsuccessful attempt to downsize Mississippi's human services agency. Then last year both landed prime Texas government jobs: Phillips as the No. 2 man at the Health and Human Services Commission overseeing the downsizing and privatization of state welfare programs; Temple as the executive director of the Texas Workforce Commission, the state's unemployment agency.
Now there are questions about whether Temple steered a $670,270 state contract to a company that Phillips founded. That company still employs Phillips' wife and is run by a woman whom Temple describes as an old "family friend."
Under the contract, Enterject is supposed to clear a backlog of 15,000 foreign worker applications for green cards. Temple said Texas has the largest backlog in the nation of such applications and that it hurts employers. He said the contract runs from Jan. 20 to Sept. 30.
Enterject originally was founded to help employers apply for tax credits for providing job training programs.
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/VzRk9
2005 Houston Chronicle Investigation
When Deputy Health and Human ServicesCommissioner Gregg Phillips and private consultant Chris Britton helped write the $1 billion legislation to privatize Texas' human services system, they apparently did so partly with an eye on profit — their own.
A Houston Chronicle investigation into the activities of Britton, Phillips and Texas Workforce Commission Executive Director Larry Temple found weaknesses in Texas ethics laws concerning conflicts of interests and cronyism. Their relationships and how they benefited from state business illustrate how Texas law has overlooked the power of lower-level bureaucrats who are often charged with crafting laws.
Current laws force state agency chiefs to disclose their financial interests but do not apply to their subordinates.
And a private consultant such as Britton can help write a state law, then try to profit from it without being subject to either the state's lobby-registration laws or revolving-door prohibitions.
The investigation found that:
•Britton's company joined with one founded by Phillips to get a $670,000 state contract in January 2004 from the Workforce Commission, a state agency run by Temple, one of Phillips' longtime friends.
•Phillips once headed the human services system in Mississippi, where legislators criticized him for giving a major state contract to a company, then going to work for the firm. In Texas, Phillips played a role in a major state contract going to another former employer in 2003.
•Phillips also apparently helped a business partner, Paige Harkins, get work advising companies on how to win Texas human services privatization contracts that he could influence. On at least one occasion, records indicate Harkins set up a meeting between Phillips and potential state vendors.
•Britton's consulting company explored bidding on state contracts that were mandated by legislation primarily drafted by himself and Phillips during the 2003 Legislature.
"The bottom line is the assistants or deputies oftentimes make multimillion-dollar decisions about the allocation of state resources, and they should be covered by laws that prohibit them from profiting from making those decisions," said ethics-reform advocate Tom "Smitty" Smith of Public Citizen.
In his job application, Phillips said he was earning $180,000 a year from Enterject Inc., a company he founded. And six months earlier he had quit a $192,000-a-year job with DeLoitte Consulting LP. His annual salary with the State of Texas would be $144,000.
But health commission records show that Phillips met regularly with officials from DeLoitte and another company, Accenture LLP, to discuss health and human services reorganization while he was helping write H.B. 2292.
And Phillips' office calendar shows he was engaged in drafting bid proposals for the first reorganization contract awarded to DeLoitte and participated in the final contract deliberations with agency lawyers.
The first two consolidation contracts went to DeLoitte for $1.7 million and Accenture for $1.2 million in September 2003.
Phillips' other potential conflict of interest while at the Health and Human Services Commission involved Enterject, which provides government contract-procurement lobbying, tax-credit tracking and Internet-based job training for health and child care workers.
But two of Enterject's clients — Texas Home Health Care of America and D&S Residential Services Inc. — provide health care under programs administered by agencies under the commission's umbrella.
The two companies together received more than $167 million in payments for state services during Phillips' tenure. Company officials or lobbyists also met with Phillips at his offices.
Georgia records show Phillips' wife, Helen, was Enterject's chief financial officer. And a company called GHT Development Inc. owned the Internet registration for the Enterject Web site. GHT listed Gregg Phillips as its chief executive.
Archive Copy: https://archive.ph/pYtTW
I actually find the above quite incredible.
Closing
I try not to focus on one thing on issue to define a person. I try to stand back at look at their patterns of behavior. With Gregg Phillips, the pattern in his Public Sector career seems to have benefitted companies with direct ties back to him. But that isn’t the only oddity, but rather a huge red flag that Gregg might be a sociopath, seeing people in need as an opportunity for personal profit.