A HOSPITAL SO BAD IT IS NEARLY DEAD

"The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Monday unexpectedly moved to shut down the trauma unit at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, immediately drawing the ire of physicians, politicians and community activists. The only public hospital serving a large swath of South Los Angeles, King/Drew treats more trauma patients than any other hospital in the region except County-USC Medical Center.

The proposed trauma closure, expected to take effect in about 90 days, amounts to a last-ditch scramble to save a foundering hospital that repeatedly has been cited by regulators for harming patients and in some cases contributing to their deaths. Under pressure from federal health officials, the supervisors also agreed to hire outside managers to run the hospital — replacing the team of county health leaders who have run it for nearly a year.

The reaction from community leaders was swift and mostly negative. Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton), who has led legislative hearings on the future of King/Drew, was outraged. "I could see if they were going to close some other department, but not the trauma center. My God, this is a crisis," he said. But Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), applauded the board's latest actions, saying they were long overdue. "It's about time that the Board of Supervisors faced up to their responsibility, and has chosen to take appropriate action, albeit unpopular," he said. "There's no expert in the area of public healthcare worth his or her salt who would deny that Martin Luther King hospital was in need of radical intervention."

The trauma unit, dedicated to treating life-threatening injuries from such incidents as shootings and car accidents, served 2,150 patients last year... Supervisor Michael Antonovich deemed the county's efforts to fix King/Drew over the last eight months "pathetic." ... "It took so many losses of life and inferior medical treatments to bring us to the stage where we are today," he said at the supervisors' news conference....

Over the last nine months, his agency removed the hospital's administrator and medical director, hired a nursing turn-around firm, installed an internal team of crisis managers and responded to demands from a host of accrediting groups and regulatory agencies. "We didn't know how much we were going to find and how hard the process would be," Garthwaite said. But many politicians said the county supervisors' actions would inevitably lead to the closure of the entire hospital."

More here.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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