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Editorial: YNHH's PR Hell
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Business New Haven
12/08/2003
By: BNH
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"Get Sick. Can't Pay? Get Sued. Yale-New Haven Heartless Hospital."
That's the message of the Route 34 Connector billboard that greets Yale-New Haven Hospital CEO Joseph A. Zaccagnino every day as he travels from the hospital to his Madison home.
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said the hospital's collection practices, including placing liens on the homes of poor patients, violated standards of "law, ethics and morality."
A local newspaper asked rhetorically, "How evil, how greedy, how cruel can one hospital be?"
Good question. A better question is: Has Yale-New Haven become so powerful an institution in this community that it imagines itself invulnerable to criticism?
Outside of the hospital, Zaccagnino is portrayed in numerous press accounts as the mastermind behind New Haven Savings Bank's controversial decision to convert from mutual to public stock ownership, a conversion that stands to put millions in the pockets of NHSB's officers and directors, one of whom is Zaccagnino.
That strategy has invoked the fury of depositors, community activists and politicians, rendering NHSB probably the second least-popular company in town.
After Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Not so long ago, as Yale professor and urban-affairs expert Douglas Rae pointed out in these pages, heading the hospital was not a powerful enough position to earn its occupant a seat at the table of New Haven's business leadership. Now, Zaccagnino is one of the city's few remaining "major" CEOs. He wields so much power that he needn't care much, perhaps, what others say about him or his institution.
Lately, much of what they're saying is very, very bad.
Think of the adjectives people want to associate with their hospital: Compassionate. Competent. Caring.
Now think of the adjectives many New Haveners have come to associate with YNHH: Cold. Calculating. Carnivorous.
What has induced New Haven's second-largest employer (after Yale itself) to squander nearly two centuries of good will? Greed? Arrogance? It's certainly not stupidity.
Hospital spokeswoman Katie Krauss asserts that "What's happening to Yale-New Haven is bad for New Haven business all around."
Krauss lays much of the blame for the damaging PR on the Service Employees International Union, which has targeted YNHH for unionization as part of a national campaign "to generate negative publicity and anti-hospital sentiment with the ultimate goal of discrediting the institution."
Still, she acknowledges that the past year has been "challenging from a PR perspective."
No doubt. Nevertheless, from the free bed funds controversy to "predatory" collection practices to the union drive to a hospital police force that abused its authority to Zaccagnino's portrayal as the prime mover behind the New Haven Savings conversion - it's hard to avoid the conclusion that maintaining a positive PR image is not very high on YNHH management's agenda.
For a company that needs to convince potential customers that it is in the caring business, that seems a terrible dereliction.
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