In a new push for its proposed expansion, Seattle Children’s Hospital pulled out the big guns today, posting a video about “the challenges of its current facilities and the strain often felt by patients, families and staff due to increasingly high patient volumes.” The video–which, the hospital warned, has scenes that could be “uncomfortable for some viewers”–takes the audience into the ICU’s and operating rooms where the lives of two-week old infants are being saved.The hospital has been battling for two-and-a-half years to get city approval for a massive 20-year expansion that would more than double its beds. The plan’s been resisted by nearby residents of Laurelhurst–best known as the neighborhood where Bill Gates grew up, and still one of the toniest in town. In August, a city Hearing Examiner recommended that the council reject the project, saying that it didn’t conform to current zoning, and questioning why the hospital wasn’t offering any alternatives besides a huge addition to its somewhat remotely located site in residential Northeast Seattle. Since then, the issue has been largely moribund. Until today.The hospital released a letter from its CEO to city council president Richard Conlin, “respectfully ask[ing]” for the council to give a yay or nay already. And the hospital issued a press release saying it had turned away 79 children during the past year due to lack of space. In an interview with the Weekly, the hospital’s chief administrative officer, Lisa Brandenburg, said that over 14,000 patients had been admitted to Children’s during that same period. Which means fewer than 1% of the kids referred to Children’s had to go to some other facility. So, from that math, how does the hospital deduce a need to expand from 250 beds to 600?Brandenburg cited the need do away with rooms that currently house two patients and make them all single-patient. And she says there are patients who aren’t admitted as fast as they could be because of the lack of space. “At no time will we build more beds than we need,” she says of the project, which would be built in four stages.She noted that the state department of health in Olympia is required to sign off on any projection Children’s makes about future demand for its services, before expansion is allowed. Trouble is, the state won’t give that “Certificate of Need” to a hospital until the hospital proves it has zoning approval to do the expansion it’s requesting–an odd Catch-22.That leaves the project in a little bit of limbo politically. To help pump up the goodwill, and advertise the growth it’s experiencing, the hospital noted today that it spent $86 million in fiscal 2008 on treatment for patients with no, or insufficient, insurance. (The hospital’s revenue from patients was roughly ten times that.)Asked how the hospital will be able to handle the leap in those costs if it more than doubles its beds, Brandenburg said the non-profit will rely on its many financial supporters.