There’s no love lost between Sutter Health and Marin General Hospital, as the long litany of legal skirmishes demonstrates. And as both health care organizations move forward, it’s clear that while they’re on different paths right now, the future holds more clashes.
Since Sutter was given the boot from running Marin General in summer 2010, Marin General has been aggressively moving on. It’s aligned itself with more than half a dozen medical clinics and practices. The latest is Cardiovascular Associates of Marin and San Francisco, a 14-doctor practice.
California law doesn’t let hospitals directly employ doctors. It does, however, let hospitals own the assets of clinics where doctors are under contract to practice. Hospitals can also set up foundations. The foundations, in turn, can hire doctors. Sutter Health has a foundation and has hired some physicians, though it hasn’t landed all the doctors it went after. Marin General partnered with Marin Independent Physicians to put Prima Medical Foundation together.
Before Marin General picked up Cardiovascular Associates, it had acquired Souna Sausalito Health Center, West Marin Medical Center, North Marin Internal Medicine, Sausalito Medical Center, San Rafael Medical Center and Marin Medical Group.
An internal Marin General study by consultant Kara Witalis predicted the acquisition of Cardiovascular would be worth an additional 300 patients a year by 2015. The move could also give Marin General more leverage in terms of reimbursement and insurance negotiations. Witalis noted in her study that, while Sutter has a sizable regional position, its influence in Marin is slipping.
On the other hand, Sutter is sitting on an asset in Marin that, while it’s an eyesore now, is likely a diamond in the rough. In 2007, before the very messy split, Sutter bought the 7.5-acre Marin Square shopping center, a micro mall bordering the Highway 101/Highway 580 interchange and San Rafael’s Canal district. Sutter also acquired a little more than three acres of land adjacent to the center. Sutter has maintained it has no plans for a new hospital, but rather it would like to have a facility that would provide high quality outpatient services, though what that would entail has never been made clear. Sutter has never presented the city of San Rafael with plans for Marin Square.
In the meantime, Sutter is in no hurry. At this writing, a couple weeks before Santa is scheduled for his yearly delivery, Marin Square is half empty. The shopping center has just nine retail tenants, with Ross Dress for Less as the anchor. Among the spaces left empty are the former homes of Luggage to Go, Men’s Wearhouse and Jenny Craig.
Moreover, there’s nary Lease Available sign in sight, which means Sutter is happy to let the leases run in the name of emptying the space for its next move.
Stay tuned. While there’s no telling what Sutter may choose to do with the center, you can be sure it will be something not only designed to improve Sutter’s bottom line (as it should be), but also to take a bite out of Marin General.
Wind farm loses energy
A pair of 200-foot-high towers in West Marin that were destined to gather wind speed and other meteorological data that could have led the way to an industrial-grade wind turbine farm on the coast has been scrapped by NextEra, a Florida-based company that operates 9,000 windmills on 77 different wind farms in the United States and Canada.
The energy company walked away from the project after a maverick group of environmentalists filed a lawsuit against it as well as the county of Marin, alleging the project required an environmental impact report. NextEra’s proposal for erecting the two towers was approved by the Board of Supervisors last year, overturning a decision against the project by the county planning commission.
The lawsuit, brought by West Marin/Sonoma Coastal Advocates, wasn’t the reason NextEra called it a day, according to a spokeswoman for the company. Rather, the company wants to focus its resources on projects more likely to be successful.
While environmentalists never felt the towers themselves were a practical threat to the environment, there was a good deal of concern over the wind turbines that could have been built had the data gathered by the initial towers proven positive. Moreover, there was concern the high-tech windmills would harm coastal birds, essentially becoming “bird Cuisinarts,” as Helen Kozoriz of West Marin/Sonoma Coastal Advocates called them.
Feds give BioMarin a thumbs up
BioMarin, the Bel Marin Keys-based biotech company focused on so-called orphan diseases (disorders that don’t have a large pool of known patients—companies involved in drug development in this area receive some federal benefit to encourage drug development), received the official green light to begin production in new labs in its expanded Novato campus.
The Food and Drug Administration has signed off on BioMarin’s labs, which the company says will support as much as $1 billion in revenues, twice the company’s previous production capacity. The improved 22,000-square-foot facility will be involved in producing Nagalazyme, part of the company’s enzyme replacement therapy platform.
The newly approved labs will also be involved in research and development work for BioMarin.
Last June, BioMarin made a big move, sinking $48 million into the acquisition of a former Pfizer drug plant in County Cork, Ireland. BioMarin already had a distribution office in Ireland and has been looking to become more active in Europe.
