So now that Uncle Sam owns General Motors, perhaps GM should sue Toyota for poaching customers. Those darn discounts are unfair, as is Toyota offering such high quality vehicles at such reasonable prices.

What's that, you say?? Such a lawsuit would be ridiculous? An abuse of the legal system? At attempt to force by intimidation what GM just can't accomplish through fair competition?

Well, don't tell the folks running Tri-City Medical Center -- which has filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit Scripps Health chain alleging that Scripps is poaching patients.

Newsflash to Tri-City's publicly elected board of directors: If you want to know why patients are fleeing Tri-City, it might behoove you to buy a mirror. Or several.

The brouhaha that the lawsuit is, however tenuously, tied to revolves around a medical practice in Oceanside. Last year, the privately owned Sharp Mission Park Medical Group was sold to Scripps, and its 64 physicians agreed to practice out of Scripps hospitals rather than Tri-City.

It's called freedom -- you have the fundamental right in this country to take your business where you want, and those doctors decided they wanted to practice at Scripps instead of Tri-City. No long-term contract tied them to Tri-City, and last time I checked, slavery was still banned in this country.

Furthermore, emergency room cases will still go to Tri-City whenever it's the closest hospital -- only elective surgeries are being referred to Scripps Encinitas, and even then patients have the final say-so in where they receive treatment.

You think the ongoing political turmoil at Tri-City -- with administrators placed on leave in secret meetings (and since fired), with the new board majority refusing to say what its secret investigation turned up (or, more likely, didn't turn up) -- might have anything at all to do with these doctors deciding they no longer wanted to be associated with Tri-City? A public hospital district that almost lost its liability insurance a few months back for sheer management incompetence?

Scripps doesn't have to "poach" patients from Tri-City -- they can just wait outside the parking lot and catch patients as they come streaming out in fear and disgust.

Which is an unfair reflection on the quality and caliber of medical care offered by the remaining doctors and nurses at Tri-City. By all accounts, the staff at Tri-City continues to offer first-rate medical care equal to anything available at Scripps' many hospitals.

It's the board politics that is scaring away would-be patients, and this lawsuit is only going to drive even more patients to Scripps (and Palomar and Sharp and … well, you get the idea).

As recently as two weeks ago, I would have written that the increasing number of rumors that Tri-City will have to close due to incompetence were asininely paranoid.

After this lawsuit, I'm not so sure.

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at jtrageser@nctimes.com or 760-740-5408.