You never know when the traditional media will latch on to a story, but they’ve certainly raised the case of L.A.’s King-Harbor Medical Center to new heights by publicizing the tragic story of a woman who died while waiting in the lobby of the emergency room while hospital staff casually walked by her.  It’s become a powerful symbol of our broken health care system.  In fact, King-Harbor has been troubled almost since the moment it opened in 1972, and the tales of woe emanating from the medical center are numerous. 

Among the cases cited:

•  One patient in King-Harbor’s emergency room told a triage nurse on April 30 that he was seeing “aliens and devils” and that he was thinking about drinking bleach to commit suicide. He was left in the lobby for more than an hour and not seen by a physician for almost seven hours. A mental health evaluation was not completed for 17 hours after he arrived, according to the federal report.

At that time, the patient denied being suicidal and was discharged without receiving treatment.

•  A female patient went to the emergency room on March 8 complaining of two weeks of stomach pain. She said she had nausea and rated her pain as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. “The patient identified that the pain she was experiencing was constant and that nothing provided relief.”

Even so, she was given no treatment to alleviate pain or reduce her fever. Two hours later, she was checked again and again offered no treatment. She was not seen by a physician until nearly seven hours after she arrived. “The patient experienced severe pain throughout her [emergency stay],” the report said. Eleven hours after she arrived, she went to surgery.

•  A patient went to the emergency room on May 11 complaining of spotting during pregnancy. An hour later, a triage nurse saw her, gave her a pregnancy test and sent her back to the waiting area. When staff called her name two hours later, she had left without being seen.

Three days later, the same woman returned to the hospital with complaints of vaginal bleeding and severe pain. A nurse didn’t evaluate how much she was bleeding and had her wait four hours without pain medication. During an ultrasound, she had a miscarriage and was discharged a short time later.

So today, state regulators have moved to close the hospital.  But is that the right thing to do?

over…

Both the governor and a portion of the LA County Board of Supervisors seem resigned to King-Harbor’s closure:

Two of the five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said Thursday that they now support closing the hospital without delay.

“I think it’s over for us,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said. “I’m in fact terrified that somebody else might be hurt or neglected or abused at Martin Luther King hospital.”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich agreed. “The time has come to put patients’ lives before incompetent employees or political agendas,” he said.

The state’s decision, which was approved by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is subject to appeal. That process could take six months to a year.

So for the next year, King-Harbor would remain open until the process is complete.  But what would be in place in the wake of any closure?  In the CA-37 debate, the district which includes the area around King-Harbor, almost all of the candidates stressed the fact that there are few options for the low-income residents that King-Harbor serves.  Most of them use public transportation and can’t afford an ambulance to take them to the next closest hospital.  And the trauma centers in the area are already overburdened, and another 47,000 ER visits per year (the approximate average at King-Harbor) could create the very problem regulators are seeking to avoid.  If there is an extended, year-long process to close King-Harbor, plans MUST be made to provide for some replacement access for the citizens who would be left with practically no alternative should they become sick or injured.  Community advocates are saying the same thing.

“We are playing with not only fire, we have gasoline in the other hand,” said Lark Galloway Gilliam, executive director of Community Health Councils. “That emergency room, you can’t let that go. Closure to me is not an option.”

Finally, this really stresses the need for a better safety net for all citizens than a crippled emergency room system that acts as a faux-universal care apparatus.  People deserve better than this.  They need to have access to preventative care instead of going to the ER for a fever.  King-Harbor’s problems are part of the larger health care crisis in America.

(I added the video of the Perata/Nunez presser after the flip – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

So, as expected, the leadership in the state legislature has agreed to combine their bills on health care reform.  The significant number is that the bill would require businesses to spent a minimum of 7.5% of payroll on health care.  But this newest proposal doesn’t come close to being universal.

Most significantly, they agreed to drop the Senate plan to require that Californians with more than modest incomes get insurance. That was intended to be the middle ground between Schwarzenegger’s insistence on universal coverage and the Assembly’s rejection of any requirement that people have insurance.

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland) and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) also agreed to apply the business requirement to every enterprise except the self-employed. The Assembly plan had carved out large exemptions for businesses with only one employee, those with payrolls of less than $100,000 and those that had been in operation for three or fewer years.

The Governor held a press conference today as well, and pretty much said that you need an individual mandate, and that nothing the Legislature passes matters, that he’ll work it all out in secret.  Now THAT’S transparency in government!

I do think that somewhere down the line, an individual mandate does make some sense because it spreads the risk pool.  And I think this new bill strengthens the tying of health care to employment, when that really should be severed.  But putting in an individual mandate without regulating the insurance companies to any major degree, or setting any ceiling on affordability or floor on coverage, seems like nothing more than shoveling billions of dollars to the for-profit healthcare industry.  So I’m not particularly jazzed by any of these proposals outside of SB 840, which of course will be vetoed.  The Perata/Nunez plan looks to me to be insufficient, though I’ll wait for the release of details.

Why is California, saddled with perhaps the worst prison system in the US, perhaps the ONLY state not to understand that adding more beds is simply not a solution to the crisis?  Many other states are understanding that rehabilitation and treatment, which addresses the root causes of crime and seeks to lower recidivism rates, is the only way to get a handle on the growth in the prison industry.  And I’m not talking about some crunchy-Granola blue state like Vermont.  I’m talking about Kansas and Texas.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) last month signed into law a prison plan that is winning accolades for its creativity. Among other measures, the $4.4 million package provides financial incentives to community correctional systems for reducing prisoner admissions and allows some low-risk inmates to reduce their sentences through education or counseling while behind bars.

Under the plan, the state offers grants to localities for preventing “conditions violations” such as parole or probation infractions – a leading cause of prison overcrowding in Kansas and nationwide. To qualify for the grants, communities must cut recidivism rates by at least 20 percent using a variety of support tactics […]

In Texas, which houses 153,000 prisoners, the Legislature recently approved a plan that lawmakers have characterized as one of the most significant changes in corrections in a decade. The package, part of the state budget awaiting Republican Gov. Rick Perry’s approval, would divert thousands of inmates from prison to rehabilitation facilities, where beds would free up twice a year as offenders get help and re-enter society. Notably, the focus on rehabilitation would put off construction of costly new prisons.

The plan includes a new 500-bed treatment facility for those incarcerated for driving while intoxicated (DWI) – offenders who often have substance-abuse problems but receive no rehabilitation and face stiff sentences without the possibility of parole, according to one state Senate aide.

“We have changed the course of the ship substantially in the state of Texas,” said state Rep. Jerry Madden (R), chairman of the House Corrections Committee and an engineer of the prison plan.

22 other states (warning, PDF) have undertaken sentencing reforms between 2004 and 2006 which will reduce incarceration rates.  In Nevada, they have recently reinstated a sentencing review commission that can recommend changes in sentencing laws (a similar measure passed the CA state Senate, but it’s unclear whether or not the Governor will sign it).  There is a growing feeling that the goal of reducing the prison population must be attacked at the level of rehabilitation and reducing sentences for nonviolent offenders.

Meanwhile, in California, we’re wedded to the same old failed solutions that have given us a broken system and the highest recidivism rate in the land.  I guess that’s post-partisan.

Last week, Brian introduced the Calitics Q2 challenge to raise needed money for our candidates at the end of the quarter.  We who won’t be able to truck it up to Zeitgeist on a Wednesday will not be outdone.  So, in association with the new Drinking Liberally on the Westside, I am announcing the Calitics Q2 Southern California Challenge.

The details:

The Cock & Bull
2947 Lincoln Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Wednesday, June 27  7:00pm-whenever

This month’s fundraiser will go towards the regular Calitics list, so now that means Jerry McNerney (CA-11), Charlie Brown (CA-04), Mark Leno (SD-03) and Calitics CaliPAC.  We’re asking you to visit the Calitics ActBlue page prior to the fundraiser and contribute.  It’s the honor system, people.

I’d also like to get some SoCal politicians on that Calitics list, so if you have a favored candidate you’d like to see us raising money for, let us know at the fundraiser.

With all of the hysteria about Michael Moore’s SiCKO, I wanted to show you a clip from another documentary that will not have the same reach as the Moore film, but covers just as important a subject.  And the focus is right here in California.

Susanville, California is a small rural town tucked into the northeast corner of the state that is one of many cities which has had to make the choice to take in a state prison as a means of economic survival.  The extent to which the town has become dependent on the prison is chilling.  The consequences of building municipal economies on the backs of the prison-industrial complex are obvious: public policy obviously would never want to REDUCE the number of inmates as that would necessarily reduce the number of workers, and support structures, and facilities to cater to inmate visitors.  And remember, the governor and the legislature are about to build these places out, adding 53,000 beds to the corrections system.  Those beds need space, and small rural towns while family farmers can be bought out provide the best opportunity.

This film is showing as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival next week.  You can see it by visiting the LAFF site and typing in “Prison Town” under “individual tickets.”