Two months before a 2008 election in which Dallas County voters agreed to help fund a new $1.3 billion Parkland Memorial Hospital, a federal inspector found that patients were being operated on without proper consent and that it wasn't clear from records who was performing surgery: trainee-doctors or fully licensed surgeons. Federal regulators warned Parkland that it risked losing Medicaid and Medicare payments for its mostly poor patients. But about a week before the election, according to documents recently obtained by the Dallas Morning News, regulators met with Parkland officials, received new information and rewrote their findings to give Parkland the all-clear. The meeting remained out of public view, and voters approved spending $747 million for the new hospital, the Morning News reports.
