ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050084
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
THE TOP executive of one hospital issues a memo offering a $20 bounty on petitions circulated by a rival to show public support for the rival's plans for a new hospital.
The memo falls into the hands of officials at the rival hospital, who release it at a fact-finding hearing on the hospitals' competing plans for new facilities to serve the Radford area. The rival demands an investigation and possible sanctions from state health officials - whose boss, the state health commissioner, will decide the fate of the two proposals. Only one will survive.
An attorney for the corporate parent of the first hospital dismisses the bounty offer as irrelevant and the release of the memo as a "sideshow" timed to distract attention "from real issues." The rival CEO says the memo speaks for itself. A hearing officer concurs that the memo has nothing to do with determining the public's needs, but suggests an apology to the public might be in order. None is forthcoming.
Days later, the memo-writing executive explains his offer was a response to what he saw as heavy-handed efforts by the rival hospital to inflate the perception of public support for its project. He didn't intend to destroy the petitions, he said, but to pass them on to the health commissioner. His tactics were aggressive, he conceded. Oops! If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't.
Hospitals are businesses as well as caretakers of a community's health. But if any evidence were needed that competition for health-care dollars has become hard-nosed, this minidrama between the CEOs of Columbia Montgomery Regional Hospital, part of the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, and Radford Community Hospital, one of Roanoke-based Carilion Health System's network of not-for-profit hospitals, provides it.
Competition can be healthy - if hospitals remember the real bottom line is how well they serve customers, also known as patients. But Columbia Montgomery Regional's bounty offer - which found no takers - was cutthroat enough, and asinine enough, to give competition a bad name.
LENGTH: Short : 44 linesby CNB