'U Guiya Hao:' Guam hospital blues
“I Can’t Make You Love Me” is the third song on Bonnie Raitt’s 1991 Grammy-winning album "Luck of the Draw."
This is a song that every songwriter wishes they had written. A true, eternal masterpiece.
The words are sung from the perspective of someone experiencing unrequited, one-sided love, and it has inspired heartbreaking covers by Adele, Prince and George Michael.
When asked, the songwriter Mike Reid said the idea for the song came from a Nashville newspaper story about a man on trial for shooting his girlfriend’s car while he was drunk. The judge asked why he had done it and the man responded with, “I learned, your honor, that you can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.”
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I'll feel the power
But you won't, no you won't…
For more than six years, I have watched fires burn at the dirty, dilapidated and dangerously decrepit Guam Memorial Hospital.
A broken hospital electrical system is what keeps my heart pounding into the late hours of the night. My knees get weak, my palms get wet, and my head spins whenever I think of GMH's electrical panel bursting into flames and killing everyone there.
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Please help me understand why GMH refuses to release the request for proposal to finally fix the hospital electrical system. What is their Why? What is it that GMH values more than fire safety?
After more than 11 emergency legislative sessions passionately called by Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero, the GMH electrical system remains in violation of federal and local fire safety regulations.
According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the hospital electrical system is an unacceptably disastrous single point of failure that must be fixed immediately.
That urgent recommendation was made in 2019.
GMH has suffered 6 electrical fires and the chaotic stairwell evacuation of the fourth-floor pediatric ward since that time. To this day, GMH remains incapable of passing a Guam Department of Public Works building safety inspection.
In light of GMH’s lackadaisical sense of urgency, we must earnestly plan for GMH to experience an explosive, catastrophic, fiery worst-case scenario.
Because hospital administrators have chosen to prioritize automobile parking stalls and $14 million computer software, GMH board members should themselves work to develop emergency evacuation plans for GMH.
As with Gov. Lou, GMH board members are personally liable for the lives of GMH patients and staff who could be killed by a hospital electrical fire that is directly caused by the GMH administration refusing to immediately fix known and identified technical and operational dangers associated with a long-deferred definitive resolution of the hospital’s fire safety violations.
Where indeed will GMH operations be conducted if the current hospital campus suffers catastrophic institutional structural failure as Gov Lou has repeatedly warned?
In fact, while GMH administrators have struggled to find the time to fix the hospital’s electrical system, Gov Lou has been relentlessly working to create an alternate universe of hospital care in the virgin jungles of Mangilao.
Unfortunately, Gov Lou’s efforts have failed to produce a new hospital over the past eight years. Guam is now left with a public hospital that is recognized as one of the dirtiest and most dangerous in America.
Incredibly, GMH wants to be paid American compensation while delivering a hospital product that fails to meet the American standard for hospital fire safety.
Furthermore, Medicare performance tracking verifies that timely and effective treatment of sepsis and septic shock is a documented vulnerability currently facing Guam's public hospital.
From Sen. Will Parkinson’s Facebook page, we learn that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, National Vital Statistics Report, published in June 2025), reported that Guam’s septicemia death rate is the highest in the nation - 43.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022.
By comparison the U.S. national average is 10.1 per 100,000. Puerto Rico 12.2 per 100,000 and Hawaii is at 11.2 per 100,000.
The homicidal failures at GMH are the consequence of GovGuam political corruption. GMH’s ultimate management failure is its focus on patronage politics rather than safe patient care.
We have seen this movie before... This is the horror show where the GovGuam people tell us that the building is all safe and ready to go. So we loaded all the kids up on the short bus and we took them to the school that Superintendent Judy said was 100% ready. Come to find, the school building is a public health disaster and a threat to all that is decent and sacred.
The Guam Memorial Hospital is the Tiyan/Simon Sanchez High School disaster on steroids. The dishonesty and delinquency of GovGuam officials amid utter leadership failure is truly heart wrenching. The pain of brokenness and abandonment truly feels like being patronized by an unfaithful lover.
GMH, you’re a real tough cookie with a long history of breaking little hearts like the one in me.
GMH, before you put another notch in your lipstick case, you better make sure you put me in my place.
GMH, hit me with your best shot. C’mon, hit me with your best shot.
Hit me with your best shot.
Fire Away.
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