TO: Marin Independent Journal, and the people of Marin
RE: Marin General Hospital’s Budget
Sunday September 14th 1997
 
The irony found each day in the news never ceases to amaze me. On the front page of the Sunday edition, your article "MGH Wonders Where to Make the Next Cuts" chronicles the financial woes that the hospital is going through. On page A6 is an advertisement for MGH headlined, "Cancer vs. Callahan". This add appeared also in Thursday’s paper. MGH is one of the most frequent advertisers in the IJ, taking out, at times, whole pages to sing their own praises. I think their ad campaign is in extremely bad taste and is a gross misuse of their "supposed" dwindling funds.
 
I suggest that their financial problems are due to grossly incompetent management exercising the poorest of business acumen. They continue to stress a manufactured reputation through style and advertising, not actual healing even though they are spending a good amount of money to tell us that they do in fact heal.
 
First of all, who are they competing with? Is not MGH the community hospital here? Why do they need to place large frequent advertisments that are FEAR based? Who do they think they are targeting and why, when MGH is the obvious choice of care should someone lucky enough to have health insurance come to need them?
 
Perhaps, they believe, if they create the fear, then they create the market. The management thinks their services can be marketed through fear.....not unlike breath-mints, diet aides, and home cleaning products which link one’s self esteem, and very social survival with the use of their product.
 
I’m straying from my first intended point; if they find themselves in financial distress, cut the advertising. The service is assumed. If they provide good care, word will spread. Right now, their reputation can only get worse under the course of action they have chosen. Regarding their extravagant building, I have never thought that a hospital’s ability to heal and cure was linked to the grandiosity of the design. In fact, it makes me suspicious that their attention isn’t in the right place. They continue to prove that over and over.
 
Julie Robinson
 
 
p.s. I will be surprised if this gets published since my intended purpose is in conflict with the needs of the paper.