Once again politicians are locking arms together as they put the final pieces together to pressure taxpayers into agreeing to let them spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new pork-barrel project — the replacement of Guam Memorial Hospital with a brand-new, state-of-the-art, shiny, with more elevators than any other building on Guam hospital.

As we listen to politicians sing their siren song, we need to remember, once upon a time, the old GMH was a new GMH and politicians ran that into the ground by using it for decades as a political ATM machine to dispense high-paying jobs and contracts to politically well-connected insiders.

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Right now, no one in management of GMH has a track record for effective management of a public hospital. Right now, GMH has twice the staffing levels of any other hospital its size and an endless line of politically well-connected insiders lining to get high paying jobs.

Right now, GMH is exempt from all the laws meant to ensure fair procurement of goods and services, and as we saw with the passage of Bill 30, the GRMC corporate welfare bill, pork-barrel contracts are flowing like water going downhill to politically well-connected supporters.

Every year, due to bad management, GMH requires $30 million over collections to keep the doors open.

In the 2018 campaign, gubernatorial candidate Frank Aguon Jr. floated the idea that GMH needed a receiver with verifiable track record for managing hospitals to take politics out of GMH. Lou Leon Guerrero swore she would appoint qualified management and restore GMH as a viable and important part of the island’s health care system.

Ensuring pork

Gov. Leon Guerrero, instead of keeping her promise to appoint qualified managers, appointed politically well-connected insiders and signed legislation that is gutting GMH’s finances — steps that when combined will help build a compelling case to convince taxpayers to agree to funding the most expensive public works project in the island’s history, thus ensuring enough pork to spread around to ensure her re-election, and the re-election of her loyal insiders in the Legislature.

GMH is stuck in a vicious political cycle that reminds of a poem by the Greek philosopher Socrates, “The Vicious Cycle.”

“When you always think what you have always thought, you will feel what you have always felt.

“When you always feel what you have always felt, you will always do what you have always done.

“When you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got.

“When you always get what you have always got, you will always think what you have always thought.”

Break cycle

The only way we as a people will ever see a strong and well-run public hospital will be to break the vicious political cycle that controls the operations of GMH. The only way to break that cycle will be to elect politicians that are more concerned about the health and safety of the people than they are about the health and safety of the bank accounts of themselves and their politically well-connected insiders.

And the way we do that is replace pork-barrel politicians with true “ublic servants starting in the 2020 election.

It is not enough to simply register to vote. After all, in 2018 more than 55,000 people registered to vote. But only 37,000 made the effort to vote. To break the political vicious cycle that has a death grip on Guam politics and, by extension, all facets of the government, you have to actually vote.

Ken Leon-Guerrero is a resident of Santa Rita.

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