Hospitals Federal Aid

The Northridge earthquake made a shambles of St. John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. Yet to this day, administrators call the quake a blessing in disguise. Amid cracked walls and broken glass, doctors decided to rebuild their aging white elephant with fewer hospital beds and more outpatient services--an ambitious undertaking they hoped would reflect the changing nature of medicine.

The Northridge earthquake made a shambles of St. John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. Yet to this day, administrators call the quake a blessing in disguise. Amid cracked walls and broken glass, doctors decided to rebuild their aging white elephant with fewer hospital beds and more outpatient services--an ambitious undertaking they hoped would reflect the changing nature of medicine.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Friday that it will provide $36.6 million to help rebuild the north wing of St. John's Hospital and Medical Center in Santa Monica. The hospital was heavily damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and the north wing had to be demolished. The funds will cover 90% of the $40.7-million rebuilding cost. "The replacement and repair of St.

Zina Campos is a most unlikely cheerleader for birth control. The infant in her arms is her ninth baby. Her obstetrician is just as unlikely an advocate for the women's reproductive rights movement: He thinks abortion is murder. Yet the two Gilroy residents have taken on those very roles in opposing the latest hospital purchase in California by a Catholic health care group--a transaction that overnight deleted an array of procedures here.

Jose Gustavo Rodriguez flew to Mexico to get a liver biopsy to determine that he had hepatitis C because he couldn't obtain timely treatment at the public hospital a few miles from his East Los Angeles home. Christina Russi had to pull out her own infected tooth because she had no health insurance, and was trapped in her house for six weeks with scabies and no access to a doctor.

In a highly unorthodox initiative aimed at alleviating a growing glut of physicians, the federal government has agreed to pay hospitals around the country hundreds of millions of dollars not to train doctors. The initiative, embedded in the federal budget agreement, extends to all 1,025 of the nation's teaching hospitals an offer similar to a controversial experiment approved for New York earlier this year.

Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency have become so concerned with the county Board of Supervisors' delays and political squabbling over how to replace the earthquake-damaged County-USC Medical Center that they are threatening to withhold some or all of the nearly $500 million in aid promised for the project. "The funding was provided to them over a year ago," said FEMA's federal coordinating officer for the project, Leland R. Wilson.

The federal government threatened Friday to cancel Medicare payments for any hospital that fails to assist in a medical emergency. The Health and Human Services Department singled out Ravens-wood Hospital Medical Center in Chicago, saying it will lose its authorization to participate in Medicare on June 21 unless it proves it has changed its ways.

A Chicago hospital that did nothing to help a gunshot victim dying outside the building has received approval for its new emergency policy and will continue to receive Medicare funding, officials said. Ravenswood Hospital Medical Center was in danger of being shut out of Medicare participation after the death May 16 of Christopher Sercye. He died 35 feet from the hospital where friends had brought him after he was caught in gang cross-fire.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday with an amendment that could prevent Kaiser Permanente from using at other company facilities federal earthquake disaster funds earmarked for the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City.