"The worst thing that can happen is that we spend all of this time identifying what went wrong in September '07, only to come back and hurriedly repeat the same problems in August '08," Ochoa said.
But the supervisors have grown impatient with the relative costliness of the facility.
The county is struggling to address the persistent financial inefficiencies at the outpatient clinic.
Patients have continued to come to the facility for outpatient services since emergency and other in-patient services ended a year ago. In that time, the county paid an average of $1,681 per patient visit at King while paying $1,121 per visit at a similar outpatient clinic in the Antelope Valley.
At the same time, the King clinic's poor reputation has kept patients away: 180,000 visits were expected over the last year, but only 120,000 patient visits were reported.
The inefficiency has limited the effect of the $200 million spent on the King facility over the last year at the same time that the need to stretch every dollar has grown.
By many measures, South Los Angeles is one of the most medically underserved areas in L.A. County.
Additionally, in an area where the vast majority are uninsured, the facility and surrounding private hospitals expect to feel the brunt of proposed cuts by the state and federal governments to the Medi-Cal program -- estimated to cost L.A. County $240 million.
As the financial problems mount, some supervisors have chided the officials who run their hospital system for being slow to respond to the challenges.
County Chief Executive Officer William T Fujioka and Interim Health Services Director John Schunhoff said the cost of King visits is high because the patients it treats have more severe symptoms, the facility is large and the clinic provides a greater variety of services than the Antelope Valley clinic.
"In an organization this big, responses to these kinds of issues need to be highly professional and backed up with data, not anecdotes," Yaroslavsky told Fujioka at a recent budget meeting. "If I told you every excuse ... about why things don't work the way they should work, you wouldn't keep me if I worked for you."
The Health Services officials promised last month to provide a comprehensive plan to bring down costs, but it has so far not been delivered.
"It's embarrassing," Yaroslavsky said at the budget meeting. "We're into the second fiscal year since the closure of Martin Luther King Hospital, and we're still doing the same darn thing we were doing before, which is spending more money in that complex than we are spending at any other place in the county."
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garrett.therolf@latimes.com
