Return of the King

Los Angeles County supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas wants to re-open Martin Luther King hospital. It was closed a couple of years ago for total incompetency. People left to die in their feces and urine. Holes punched in the walls. People setting up stalls in in the corridors. No one keeping records. The administrators sending out letters to workers informing them that they actually had to show up at the hospital in order to be paid. Night-time X-ray technicians sleeping through their entire shifts. Nurses letting people die and then falsifying the records. The president of the hospital billing the country for more than 24 hours of work per day (when he truth he was never at the hospital more than three or four. And when he did actually come to work he used to require his secretary/executive assistant come out in the parking lot just to carry in his briefcase for him. Why didn't he carry it in himself? I don't know. He was on his cellphone? He didn't think doctors should have to do manual labor?)

The county made the right decision in deciding to close the place. It wasn't doing what hospitals are supposed to do--provide medical care to the community. The LA Times notes that the people in South Central now have far less access to medical care than the other residents of LA County. Ridley-Thomas has dedicated himself to bringing the hospital back. Yaroslavsky is on-board if the hospital can be partnered with UCLA or some reputable institution.

Of course medical care was never the reason that they built Martin Luther King hospital in the first place. After the original LA riots it was decided the area needed jobs. What better way to provide them than to build a hospital and a teaching university as well. Health care was besides the point. They just wanted people to have jobs so they didn't riot anymore. Since health care was never the real justification, it was never provided. And the notion that the place had to be run by blacks meant that race was the only factor in appointing administrators. The hospital was incompetent from the top down. And now they want to bring the hospital back again with the same civil service rules that prevented them from ever firing incompetent staff in the first place.