Opinion: In today’s pages: Should King-Harbor be shut down?
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Thomas Scully, former administrator of the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs who helped craft a bailout of L.A. public hospitals over four years ago, says closing King-Harbor isn’t the answer:
So, when the federal government sees a hospital repeatedly fail its surveys, doesn’t it have an obligation to pull its federal funding or shut the hospital down? Yes, and the government does, if there is any viable option. But shuttering King-Harbor is really not a smart or realistic long-term move. It may make for good TV, but it won’t help the next Edith Isabel Rodriguez, and it won’t help the next kid who gets into an ambulance in desperate need of a nearby hospital.... Given the situation, the best the federal government can do is to poke, prod and push the hospital — and the county — to improve.
UC Irvine professor Jack Miles remembers surviving a perforated bowel — the same ailment that killed Edith Isabel Rodriguez at King-Harbor — thanks to the Arcadia Methodist Hospital ER. Columnist Rosa Brooks wonders if Albanians are the only fans that Bush has left, and columnist Joel Stein considers what may happen to syndicated ‘Law & Order’ episodes if star Fred Thompson runs for president.
The editorial board says democracy isn’t dead, even if it’s causing civil wars in the Middle East. It responds to Los Angeles schools Supt. David L. Brewer’s state of the schools address, and encourages solar power legislation for the state.
Letter writers react to the tragedy at King-Harbor. Garden Grove’s Margery Sucher says: ‘I recall Yvonne Brathwaite Burke about two years ago saying, ‘That hospital will be closed over my dead body.’ Well, Yvonne?’