Hospital plans prove there’s always more to story

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the basic tenets of modern advertising is that one should never view a product as the actual product being sold, which is why we’ve been exposed to such gems as “fresher because it’s frozen.”

And one of the essential truths about San Francisco is that one should never mistake the reason for any political battle for the one being publicly pitched, since such fights are usually a smoke screen for some other veiled mission.

Rarely has that been the case as clearly as in the current face-off about a plan to build a major new hospital in the heart of San Francisco.

This year, California Pacific Medical Center unveiled an ambitious project to build a 555-bed hospital and adjoining medical offices at the site of the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Van Ness Avenue. The plan is part of the medical center’s goal of consolidating services at several hospitals it runs in The City, including the rebuilding and downsizing of St. Luke’s Hospital on Cesar Chavez Street.

As evidenced by a four-hour hearing before the Planning Commission last week, some neighborhood groups and a number of unions have their scalpels out for the project. They say they are worried about a potential loss of affordable housing and the possible decrease in health care to underserved neighborhoods, and that the medical center is too focused on profit and not on charity care.

They also raised concerns about the project ruining the “character” of the neighborhood. I’m not sure exactly what type of community feeling that car-strewn section of San Francisco exudes, but this situation proves that when mounting an anti-development attack here, nothing can be left off the table.

But what you won’t hear from the opposition forces is key to what no doubt will be a long, contentious fight. The real focus for opponents is union jobs, money and the entitlements that go along with them. As health care skirmishes go, this one could be called Stealthy San Francisco.

The red-herring slope is long and slippery. It includes sacrosanct views — as espoused by representatives of supercilious Supervisor Chris Daly — that the plan should be reconsidered in light of the fact that 11 affordable housing units would be lost to accommodate a nearly $2 billion state-of-the-art central city hospital. California Pacific Medical Center has already offered to pay and relocate all tenants in the housing, making that argument moot. But hey, when you can sincerely state that adding a 555-bed medical center is less important than saving 11 rundown single-room-occupancy units, you might as well sign up for membership in the Flat Earth Society.

The battle about the new Cathedral Hill hospital is really an old one, stretching back several years when it appeared that aging, underutilized and money-losing St. Luke’s would close. The unions, including the California Nurses Association and SEIU United Healthcare Workers, launched a holy war on the subject and a blue-ribbon task force was assembled to study it and ultimately recommended replacing the hospital.

The medical center agreed. And as part of ongoing consolidation, it announced that it would rebuild St. Luke’s with an 80- to 86-bed facility. The unions wanted 300. Considering that the average census at St. Luke’s is about 50 beds filled daily, such a thought would seem to be a bit extreme. That’s until you realize that the reason for the fight is that St. Luke’s is a union hospital and the new Cathedral Hill facility won’t be, at least when it opens.

It could result in more jobs, possibly hundreds or thousands of them. But you see, they’re the wrong jobs, health care networks be damned.

Also, the medical center — which operates three San Francisco campuses — is under pressure to build a new hospital to meet the state seismic safety guidelines by 2013. Now, there’s no arguing about the fact that the Cathedral Hill hospital would be a dominant structure along Van Ness Avenue, since, as envisioned, it would be 15 stories high, cover one city block and have all the construction nuisances that such a large development brings. Yet, California Pacific Medical Center has been meeting with neighborhood groups and has already reduced the size of the hospital in response to complaints.

So far, however, I haven’t heard anyone suggest saving the Cathedral Hill Hotel — possibly one of the ugliest hotels ever built in San Francisco, just slightly less horrible than the original Jack Tar Hotel from which it morphed.

But there’s still time.

Ken Garcia appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The Examiner. Check out his blog at sfexaminer.com/opinion or e-mail him
at kgarcia@sfexaminer.com.