The Times is asking the two major candidates competing to succeed Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke about some key issues in the 2nd District, which stretches from Mar Vista through South Los Angeles and into Compton and Carson.
Today, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks and state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) offer their solutions to healthcare issues facing the county and the district, including a growing budget deficit in the county's Health Services Department, large numbers of uninsured patients and the failure, so far, to reopen Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center, formerly known as Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, near Watts, as promised.
Between now and the June 3 election, the candidates will address other questions in this series of occasional articles.
--
What specific steps should be taken to get the hospital reopened, including ways to pay for and ensure quality patient care there? Is a county partnership with another entity, such as the University of California or a private healthcare provider, a desirable option?
Parks: King-Harbor must be reopened as a full-service hospital at the earliest possible date under the management of a competent and accountable partner.
I believe in reopening King-Harbor in stages . . . first as a quality inpatient care community hospital. As that is accomplished, we can then add specialty services like trauma care, specialized surgeries and specialized critical care functions. I think the collaboration of a teaching institution, preferably a UC system school, (as I proposed in my recent letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger) is important. While maintaining oversight and control of county funding, the Board of Supervisors cannot and should not be the primary interface. The county needs an independent, expert and accountable structure to do this.
The most attractive alternative would be a county Health Authority dominated by healthcare and health management professionals sufficiently insulated from political vagaries to provide firm and dispassionate oversight, completely transparent.
A new idea that needs to be explored is the creation of an independently elected county surgeon general position. The restoration of the hospital to a full-service, fully licensed facility would return federal funding lost by virtue of the loss of accreditation. The structural imbalance between costs of operation and revenue to pay those costs would remain, however, so long as the size of the uninsured population continues to grow.
