He isn't buying the hospital, he is donating the proceeds from the patent to the hospital to cover the financial shortfall.

That wouldn't make sense to me (although I do think he should receive no where near what would be required to buy a hospital from one patent), but if the board has voted on two separate bids, and selected the highest, why would they then throw both bids out just to accept a large donation. Couldn't the Qs have done that themselves?

The board didn't accept the largest bid, the bids were equal, the question was whether they wanted the hospital to stay open or not.

I honestly can't see any hospital agreeing to sell the hospital to a real estate developer to turn it into condos anyway. Why exactly would these people be serving on the board of a hospital if they don't care about the hospital's mission?

And by the way, can we talk about how bad of an idea it is to turn a hospital into luxury condos? What are you do with all of the medical equipment? The nurse's station etc? Are you going to put a mattress on the MRI machine and call it a bedroom? However much it might cost to buy a hospital, getting all of the medical equipment out and converting the entire building into something else will cost at least three times that amount.

*> @autoexec.batman said:

The board didn't accept the largest bid, the bids were equal, the question was whether they wanted the hospital to stay open or not.

I honestly can't see any hospital agreeing to sell the hospital to a real estate developer to turn it into condos anyway. Why exactly would these people be serving on the board of a hospital if they don't care about the hospital's mission?*

That makes even less sense to me (I watch the show while working, so I miss some details), but why would they accept a bid to turn the hospital into condos if the bids were equal?! And while you were right, Finn was just going to make a donation, I don't understand why the Qs didn't simply do that. This seems like drama for the sake of drama. And a way to get Finn and Greenlee (blanking on her name currently) back together.

*>

And by the way, can we talk about how bad of an idea it is to turn a hospital into luxury condos? What are you do with all of the medical equipment? The nurse's station etc? Are you going to put a mattress on the MRI machine and call it a bedroom? However much it might cost to buy a hospital, getting all of the medical equipment out and converting the entire building into something else will cost at least three times that amount.*

I've seen it done with a small "mental hospital." Not long after it came out that the patients of the hospital were being abused and severely neglected, it closed and then they turned the property into luxury condos. I wouldn't live in those condos simply because of the ridiculous prices, but I certainly don't want to live in a building where helpless mentally disabled people were abused and neglected. That's some serious negative energy flowing there.

I don't believe in the concept of 'negative energy', but a mental hospital is basically just a bunch of bedrooms, there isn't going to be a lot of medical equipment in there. In a hospital, you're going to have millions of dollars worth of medical equipment, x-ray machines, MRI machines, ultrasound, all the equipment in the lab, it's not stuff that is going to be cheap or easy to remove or get rid of....what exactly did you do a used MRI machine anyway?

And note that the board accepted Finn's offer without having any evidence that this 'cure' even exists, or that he sold it, or for how much money, nor of how much money the patent will generate etc etc etc He basically just said 'I sold a patent, you all can have the money' and the hospital board said 'okay, let's reverse our last vote', it was asinine. It would not be accurate to call this 'bad writing', this is the kind of writing that aspires to badness, being merely bad would be a step up.

Well, a hospital I used to work in was bankrupt for a long time, despite being sold twice, and was finally sold to a real estate developer who planned to turn it into low income housing for senior citizens. They sold off some of the equipment and bulldozed the building completely. It didn't take long at all. This does happen in real life. It was sad because the hospital had been built and established decades ago by the steel workers in the community, but the population changed and towards the end too many non-paying patients sent the hospital into a financial tail spin that it could never recover from.

But if they had to bulldoze the place to do it, doesn't that kind of prove my point about how hard it would be to convert the building?

Frankly, I think condos would be a better deal than GH anyway, given than 2/3 of the town lives in the Metrocourt, a hotel, it seems Port Charles has a severe housing shortage.

Okay, maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I got the impression that GH would not only get a lump sum but that they would be getting future ongoing profits from the sale of the drug and that's what was attractive to the board members.

Yes, but Finn never provided them with any documents to prove that the deal even existed, nor did he provide them with any specific numbers. Maybe the 'ongoing future profits' will 25 cents per decade, how could the board know otherwise?

I thought there was some paper reflecting the existence of the deal that Finn passed to the board members before they voted. Of course, the problem may be that I have a split brain going on while watching GH: one side sees what the writers have written and the other side (the one that employs logic) sees what I think SHOULD be happening.

How could Finn possibly have paper documentation of the deal when he just made it 30 seconds earlier over the phone?

My mean-spirited side is kind of hoping that after Finn has so generously given the board the means to save General Hospital that he will now be fired for being a drug addict.

Firing someone merely for having an addiction is illegal, it violates the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. An employer has to walk a very fine line when dealing with an employee with an addiction, you have to document, document, document everything, and you have to give the employee a chance to clean his act by going to rehab.

@autoexec.batman said:

How could Finn possibly have paper documentation of the deal when he just made it 30 seconds earlier over the phone?

Finn had them fax over the offer so the board did have documentation of the donation amount.

Then if the fax arrived in the 10 seconds between when Finn walked the three feet free where he was taking the phone call to the board room, it was the fastest fax machine ever.

I was only half watching, if even that, but the scene was preposterous regardless, the deal was already made and then suddenly change their minds? That strikes me as being of dubious legality, and it would probably leave the hospital open some kind of breach of contract lawsuit.