Emergency Medical Care

His smashed finger wrapped in bandages, Len Balon walked into an emergency room and eyed the flat-screen monitor broadcasting live wait times for Scottsdale Healthcare's area hospitals. Osborn Hospital, where he was standing: two hours and 55 minutes. Thompson Peak hospital, a short distance away: four minutes. Balon sat down to read a long Civil War memoir he'd brought in preparation for a long delay. His dread of an emergency room wait was justified. A study released this month found that wait times nationwide had continued to climb over the last 10 years.

In the first such prosecution in the city, a criminal charge was filed Thursday against a nurse at Panorama Community Hospital who allegedly denied emergency medical care to a seriously ill baby girl, telling her parents to go to a county hospital, the Los Angeles city attorney's office said.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) proposed a multibillion-dollar plan Friday under which the federal government would fully reimburse states for providing emergency medical care to illegal immigrants. California, which has an estimated half of the nation's illegal immigrants, could receive more than $400 million a year under the plan outlined by Gingrich at an airport news conference. The Speaker said the proposal could cost the federal government up to $6 billion nationwide over seven years.

Part of the price of failing to provide adequate health-care funds has become more apparent with the announcement that another trauma center in Los Angeles County will be closed. The closing will mean a further deterioration in emergency medical care, which means fewer lives saved after traffic accidents, heart attacks and violent crimes.

Dr. John Reinisch was about to sit down to a Mother's Day dinner with his family when he received a distressing call from Childrens Hospital, where he is chief of the plastic surgery unit. A 4-year-old boy's arm had been severed by a washing machine and he was at the hospital awaiting surgery. Reinisch was on call that night, so he raced to the hospital and examined the boy. He told the boy's parents that he would do his best, but he was very doubtful that he could successfully reattach the arm.

Centinela Freeman HealthSystem announced Tuesday that it will close the emergency room at Memorial hospital in Inglewood, a move that critics warn would further strain Los Angeles County's frail emergency care system. Beginning in November, patients would be shifted to the facility's sister campus, Centinela hospital, about 1 1/2 miles away, as part of a consolidation plan aimed at reducing costs.

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital shut down its emergency room Friday night and will close entirely within two weeks, a startlingly swift reaction to a federal decision to revoke $200 million in annual funding because of ongoing lapses in care. The extraordinary developments mark an end to nearly four years of failed attempts to reform the historic institution, treasured by many African Americans as a symbol of hope and progress after the 1965 Watts riots.

Emil Matasareanu, one of two armed robbers who raided a North Hollywood bank and then engaged police in a chilling televised shootout last year, slowly and unnecessarily bled to death because some of the officers involved made a series of mistakes and some of the firefighters violated their department's guidelines for dealing with such situations, a Times investigation has found.

The North Hollywood shootout trial appeared headed for a mistrial Wednesday after the jury reported it was hopelessly deadlocked over whether police allowed a wounded bank robber to bleed to death. "Regrettably, the jury is unable to reach an unanimous verdict," the jury foreman said in a note sent to U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder on the third day of deliberations. The note gave no indication of how the jury was split. Despite "vigorous discussions, review of the evidence, etc.

A lawsuit challenging Disneyland's medical and security services reached midpoint Tuesday after two experts testified that treatment of a visitor who was stabbed in the park and later bled to death was substandard. Today, Disneyland lawyers will begin their defense of the $60-million damage claim filed by the parents of Mel C. Yorba, who died after he was stabbed in Tomorrowland by another park visitor in 1981.