How do you Choose Your Hospital?
Mister Ambulance Driver: Take Me To The Hospital That’s on the Mets Uniform, and Please Hurry!
September 29, 2023
So you got yourself seriously injured and are now lying in the back of a speeding ambulance while two EMTs try to strap you down. We’ve all been there. As the ambulance barrels through a red light intersection, the driver whips his head around and asks, “Where to?” as in “What hospital should we take you to?”
There’s no time to think, it’s an emergency, but for me the answer is obvious. No thinking required. Take me to the only hospital that resides in my consciousness, the one that I see every night advertised on the patch on the sleeve of the New York Mets team uniform. The one I saw on the game tonight prominently embroidered for the TV camera to pick up during every close-up. The one mowed into the grass in foul territory at Citi Field and the subject of at least one brand blast between innings during each home game: the one and only NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. (Fun fact: no space between New and York.)
Why that hospital? What do you mean, “why?” I just told you. Because I saw that hospital’s name and logo as recently as the latest Mets broadcast, such that I can confidently latch onto it in the split second purchasing decision of a proud American consumer while squirming in the back of a speeding emergency vehicle. God Bless the USA.
How do you choose YOUR hospital?
If you stop and think about advertising, most of it is laughable. Either it can’t possibly work, which makes it laughable. Or it actually does work, which makes it even more laughable. In each instance, the joke’s on us.
Brand advertising has long been an omnipresent part of the fabric of American society. The media and platforms have evolved somewhat, but the purpose has not: to connect a company’s product or service or brand to those people who will give them their money. If only people knew about this great product, service, or brand, they would certainly buy it. Let’s get the word out. It costs money to advertise, but if done well, if it generates more customers or supports charging a premium price, it will make you more money than you spend.
Even if this last sentence bears truth for most products and services, it doesn’t mean it always makes intuitive sense. Even economically defensible advertising can still come across as Dumb-Ass. For me, hospital advertising is in the upper echelon of Dumb-Ass Marketing. Insurance companies are close on their heels, but we’ll get to them later.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a not-for-profit institution. It is a fine hospital. All of my children were born there, long before they infiltrated the fabric of my favorite team’s jersey. But just because they are not-for-profit does not mean they don’t need to run a business, and part of running a business is reaching out to new customers – in this case, patients and donors.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital gets paid for the medical care they provide, whether through insurance companies, or the government (us), or the patients themselves (also us). They get paid when I park my car there, like $60.00 for two hours. They have a cashier next to the exit who won’t let you leave until they get their money. If you have a medical procedure performed there and take some time before paying the multiple thousand dollar bill they mailed you because you are sure that someone must have made a mistake somewhere (what the fuck is “co-insurance”?), the hospital will nonetheless hunt you down and send a collection agency after you.
In addition, despite making sure they collect every red nickel, many ludicrously rich people write them large checks in return for their names being written in stone and their portraits being hung in places like the Greenberg Pavilion or the Starr Pavilion. They even send me letters every year to coax me into writing them checks as well. There were times in which I received a collection notice and a letter asking for a donation on the same day in the same mailbox.
Against this backdrop is the fact that this institution is charged with providing medical care. It is there quite literally to save people’s lives. And yet the hospital just spent millions of dollars of donor and government and insurance and my money to put their logo on the jersey of a professional baseball team. The best this venerable medical institution can do with its $10 billion dollar budget is to allocate a certain significant percentage to marketing its brand, and the most effective means of delivering a return on the investment of those marketing funds is apparently to embed its logo into the grass at Citi Field.
In isolation, this seems like madness. This seems especially true when the correlation between the investment and the return is so speculative and tenuous – because how can it not be? But more fundamentally, when an institution is charged with saving people’s lives, shouldn’t that money be used first and foremost to save people’s lives? When you spend money on other shit, my first question is whether that money might best be used for another purpose. You don’t think there’s a family out there who needs an organ transplant who can’t afford it? A family who might appreciate a discount on that kidney? If I was a rich potential donor, and I am neither of those things, I would first ask whether I should send the check to the hospital or directly to the New York Mets. Because what the fuck.
This inherent tension between the service and the advertising money is also endemic to another notoriously marketing-happy industry: insurance companies. Talk about an industry that loves to advertise, this is upper echelon Dumb-Ass Marketing. Holy shit. Allstate, Geico, State Farm, Nationwide, Liberty Mutual, Farmers, Progressive. Watch any NFL football game, any live sporting event, any ten seconds of commercial television, and you will likely be inundated with the fine work of advertising agencies getting paid millions and millions of dollars to break through to consumers in this highly competitive industry.
There’s Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes doing dozens of incomprehensible State Farm commercials. How much did that shit cost? And to add to the confusion, why does the actor who plays the insurance agent always look infinitely more athletic than the star quarterback?
In their lust to advertise, these companies are so clueless that Farmers even uses the actor who played a sadistic, ass-raping Neo-Nazi on the HBO series Oz as its key spokesperson. (But didn’t he win an Oscar for something since then? Yes, for playing a cruel and sadistic character, his specialty.) In an effort to out-ass-rape the competition, even the Mayhem guy from Allstate was a sadistic murderer on the same show, Oz. So was his real brother, in real life and on Oz, also pitching on behalf of Allstate. If Adebisi shows up singing the Nationwide song, I’m going to throw a brick through my television.
By the way, is there anything more destined for failure than multiple attempts to construct an entire song out of the Nationwide jingle? It’s called a jingle for a reason, folks. It’s not fucking Hey Jude. (It’s only a matter of time before someone pays the Foo Fighters millions of dollars to build a shitty rock song around the Farmer’s jingle – We are Farmers, bum bumda bum bum bum bum bum.)
More to the point, if the prison rape connection seems a bit much, it’s possible you’ve never dealt with one of these insurance companies in real life. Unlike hospitals, insurance companies are for-profit institutions. They are not only expected to deliver profits to their shareholders, but, this being America, are also expected to grow those profits each year. “What about our shareholders, Mr. Incredible?” In any event, if the people who run these insurance companies are tasked with growing operating revenue each year, they can do one of two things: generate more insurance premiums or pay fewer claims.
When you spend billions on television commercials each year, billions, including the expensive premium ad time associated with running those commercials, including paying Patrick Mahomes and the odious Aaron Rodgers (despite no doubt saving money by having the scripts written by Artificial Intelligence, so it seems), it is difficult to conceptually distinguish those dollars from the other dollars—you know, the dollars needed to pay their customers when they bring an actual claim.
Hence the old adage (which I just made up): Every time a lizard appears on your TV screen for 30 seconds, ten insurance claims get denied.
The paradox of advertising is that if consumers truly understood that they were the ones footing the bill for it in one way or another, they would never sign up for it. It should repel customers, but it doesn’t. This is why it’s called Dumb-Ass Marketing. Care to guess who the Dumb-Asses are?
One final word on uniform advertising. Selling out your team’s dignity is not a new phenomenon. I wish the Mets didn’t do it, but no one can feign outrage when your team is owned by a hedge fund billionaire. Steve Cohen didn’t become rich by turning down millions of dollars for something as easy as sewing a patch onto a sleeve. It’s just real estate. As disappointing as it is to see my beloved Mets wearing a tacky patch on their uniform, it is doubly upsetting that the Yankees had the class to refrain from doing the same thing.
But wait… No!! To be clear, everything you just read from the ambulance ride to now has been leading up to this. The venerable Yankees – with their Iconic (with a capital “I”) pin stripes and the Tradition (with a capital “T”) to not even put the players’ names on their uniforms lest they sully the brand, and with only six un-retired two digit numbers available for next season’s team – have also turned to the dark side with an infinitely more idiotic patch on their uniform sleeve. Say it ain’t so, Joe!
It is so.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you: Starr Insurance.
Starr Insurance? Is that made up?
Yes, Starr Insurance. And it’s not made up. It’s real. I swear to God.
You see, true to the Yankee’s Iconic Tradition of Hubris (with a capital “H”), and being one of the last true aspirational WASP brands (as distinct from the Jewish financier across the river), they have chosen to accept their tens of millions of dollars from a global insurance giant that apparently specializes in aviation and marine insurance, a company that insures, among other things, planes and ships. They probably insured U.S. Steel at some time as well. And U.S.S.R. Stalin. This is perhaps the finest crystallization of the Yankees brand imaginable. Was the British East India Company not available?
(Fun fact: the current Chairman of Starr Insurance is apparently named Lord Peter Levene. Look it up. Even funner fact: the founder of Starr Insurance, C.V. Starr, once made a massive donation to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, hence Starr Pavilion. Small world these people who pretend to help other people.)
This reminds me of the old adage: every time you see a Starr Insurance patch while Aaron Judge is batting, a plane crash claim gets denied.
My favorite part about all of this is that the Yankees act like they are above the trashy consumerism of most advertising. They’re not the QUIKRETE of the Atlanta Braves; what they do is business-to-business outreach. You can’t buy Starr Insurance at The Home Depot. It’s just so perfect that the Yankees have defiled their heretofore pristine uniform in pursuit of a douchey sponsor holding forth the promise of faux prestige, when all they’re really doing is pursuing those tens of millions of dollars. The Yankees brand extensions always seem to follow the same logic, from their orchestral music to the Yankees cologne to the selection of sponsor for the uniform patch: what does a classless person think other people will think is classy?
In this regard, they remind me of another prominent brand, a brand that also took hold in New York City but is now ubiquitous in the America of 2023. Maybe after the Starr Insurance “partnership” expires in 2031 (!) they can just cut to the chase and put the brand that has always been destined to be on the Yankees uniform front and center, once and for all.
Two words: Trump Steaks.