SUDDENLY, NO MORE LAMENTATIONS FROM BROTHER EDER

By Juan Montoya

Social media consumers had gotten used to hear how hard Eder Hernandez, P.A., and the medical workers under is supervision – despite they and their own families being unmercifully assailed themselves by the COVID-19– had valiantly forged ahead to conquer the devil virus.

Eder recounted on a podcast run by local cyber gadfly Erasmo Castro how, despite these troubles and tribulations, they had courageously tested more than 12,000 clients at the Sports Park and at their private offices sacrificing family life and a nonexistent social life.

We had recounted how Valley Med Urgent Care had been granted a de facto monopoly after talks with other vendors were suddenly abandoned and the city manager was instructed (by whom? no one knows yet) to ink a deal with the Valley Med on March 24. The first invoice was dated March 25, the next day, and was the first of 91 invoices to come for the period between then and July 30.

During that period, Valley Med billed the city – and was paid – $815,000. No, it wasn't Hernandez who got the cash, but rather the association of doctors who own the firm. But people associate Valley Med with Hernandez because of his flair for courting social media. Comes with the territory.

Valley Med got the endorsement of the mayor who said patients seeking tests with health insurance would be referred to its private clinic and those that didn't would be funneled to the city's Sports Park complex also operated by Valley Med with their cost borne by the city .

"The people who are looking for the test, if they have medical insurance, then the medical insurance will be taken through the office of Dr. [Eder] Hernandez,” Mendez said then. “If for any reason they don’t have insurance, then there are funds available through the City of Brownsville to cover that."


Many medical professionals (especially some from East Asia and India) who had guided Hernandez to learn the ropes of testing and general medicine were disappointed and considered him a hypocrite and an ingrate when he shunted them aside and went off to reap the profits with the knowledge they had freely provided him.

He had gained entrée into their group by joining their Christian group and even got baptized with them. Some believers say it might not have been his first baptism citing one they saw performed on him at the ICC months before. Can't be too sure, we guess.

It would be July 3 and July 10 – four months later in the midst of mounting complaints about the lag between testing and getting the results from Eder's group – before the Valley Med monopoly was broken and two other players in the testing game were given a chance to wet their beak.

Valley Med informed the city July 30 that it would no longer be performing the tests for the city at the Sports park, taking the $815,000 in city payments for the four months gig, and setting up a private shop to service the 5 p.m. to midnight niche.

The two outfits hired were The Port Occupational and Medical Clinic LLC with president Dr. Antonio Diaz (August 3) and South Texas Medical Associates with their Reliable Urgent Care LLC represented by administrator Edward Bustos (August 10) who inked the deals.


We have head that many local doctors who had supported Mendez's candidacy for mayor were miffed by the city when they chose Valley Med over their testing companies even as they prepared to provide the service.

And during that four-month span we were told not only by Hernandez, but also by his boosters in the city like Mayor Trey Mendez and commissioner Jessica Tetreau that his weary staff were working 24/7 to "serve the community" despite the hit on their social lives.

Only until we got a copy of all three contracts and found that PAs like Hernandez had been granted an hourly rate of $150 an hour (four PAs alone at Valley Med) plus costs of the test kits ($110 per kit) and the pay for their staff which included two ghost supervising MDs (Teresa Saavedra and Dr. Abdur Rauf). That's only what they got from the city. Those patients referred to them by the city who had insurance were billed apart.

At $150 an hour, who wouldn't work 24/7 (plus overtime even)?

Now that Hernandez and Saavedra and Rauf have moved on to private testing to "serve the community" we probably won't be reading the Lamentations of Hernandez on social media anymore. In fact, he is said to have gone back and removed the majority of his postings on social media. Pity. It provided some comic relief to this crisis when it was most needed.