A majority of Los Angeles County supervisors said Friday that they are ready to vote next week to begin the process of closing Martin Luther King Jr.Harbor Hospital.
Faced with a threat from California regulators to pull the hospital's license, Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, Gloria Molina and Mike Antonovich indicated that they wanted to act before the county's hand was forced.
That would enable them to put in place an orderly plan to protect the South Los Angeles patients who depend on King-Harbor for their care, they said.
The action would essentially start the clock ticking toward closure. State law requires 90 days' notice before an emergency room can be shut down. Such a move would also suggest that the three supervisors are not inclined to do battle with the state over King-Harbor's fate.
"We might as well get started," Molina said. "There's real jeopardy that we may be in a situation where we are going to be closed down. That's more dangerous, because then we'll be ill-prepared and ... create a real flood for other hospitals. This is a much more effective way."
The supervisors would still have the option of reversing course, however, if the hospital passed an upcoming federal inspection and the state retreated from its plan to pull the license.
King-Harbor, formerly known as King/Drew, has been out of compliance with the federal government's minimum patient care standards since January 2004. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said it would pull the hospital's funding for good in August if it failed the inspection.
In recent weeks, the hospital's failures made national news when a 43-year-old woman died after writhing untreated on the floor of the emergency room lobby for 45 minutes. A second case came to light as well, in which a brain-tumor patient waited four days without treatment before his family and friends drove him to another county hospital for emergency surgery.
The board members' statements to The Times came a day after California regulators threatened to pull King-Harbor's license. If the state Department of Health Services follows through, the hospital will be forced to shut down. If the county appeals, however, the process may take a year or more.
"The bottom line of all this is the county is moving toward closure, and I think it is more likely than not that the hospital will close," Yaroslavsky said.
