PART ONE OF TWO PARTS
When the Motion Picture & Television Fund announced last month that it was shuttering the long-term care facility and hospital at its Woodland Hills retirement home – effectively ending the comprehensive care it once provided to aging actors, studio employees and film technicians -- it painted a dire picture of itself as a charitable organization on the brink of financial ruin.
The foundation established by Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin 87 years ago said it was losing $10 million a year because of ever-diminishing Medicaid and Medi-Cal reimbursements to its elderly residents, and risked depleting its endowment completely within a few years if it did not act immediately to stanch the flow of red ink.
There is, however, a major problem with that explanation: it does not appear to be entirely true.
The numbers being bandied about by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the MPTF’s chief fundraiser, and other officials do not square with the organization’s own official accounting numbers and tax returns.
Those documents – the most recent filed with the Internal Revenue Service in November 2008 – show no $10 million losses, or any losses at all. The fund’s assets – described in one press release as “draining… at an alarming rate” – actually increased in 2006 and 2007, the last year for which figures are available.And while it is true that Medi-Cal reimbursements have indeed declined since last summer for hospital care (though not for other medical and nursing-home services), the fund’s accounts show a net increase in government reimbursements for both 2006 and 2007.
One nursing care expert who has looked closely at the reimbursement numbers, Betsy Hite of the California Association of Health Facilities, characterized the MPTF’s explanation of the closures as “hogwash.”
Officials from the United Healthcare Workers union, which concluded a nine-month long contract negotiation with the MPTF last April, said they researched the fund’s finances extensively and found no cause for concern.
The MPTF opened a new state-of-the-art gym and fitness facility, the Saban Center for Health and Wellness, in July 2007. The multi-million dollar project seems inconsistent with an organization in financial trouble.
The MPTF itself offered no comment to TheWrap when challenged on the apparent discrepancies. Fund officials were given several opportunities – both over the phone and in writing – to explain their accounting figures and refute the allegation that they were not telling the truth about them. But they chose not to, saying only: “We are not doing any more interviews on the subject.”The closures, announced without warning last month, have provoked widespread consternation inside the home itself, as well as in the entertainment community at large. Many in Hollywood have privately expressed outrage and embarrassment at the impression that the entertainment industry cannot take care of its own.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks Animation Chairman who heads an annual fundraiser at this time of year for the MPTF Foundation, has felt it necessary to offer public explanations, though he has done so only on
