Health care fails to meet demands
By Daily Bruin Staff
Oct. 8, 2006 9:00 p.m.
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When Kevin stopped attending the Asthma Reading and Advocacy
Program at the King/Drew Medical Center six months ago, I figured
that he would return soon.
Kevin was one of my students in the South Central L.A. program.
Its mission was to help youth with asthma develop math and reading
proficiency and effectively manage their health condition.
Gone a week, I worried that Kevin had succumbed to the
persistent nature of asthma or just decided to stop attending the
program.
It was only later that I found out that he had been shot the
previous weekend in a drive-by shooting.
While he survived the incident with gunshot wounds to the knee
and was successfully treated at King/Drew, Kevin would not have
been shot had he come to class.
The incident reaffirmed to me the value of community programs
such as ARAP in providing preventive education and care for
children and adults alike, and the importance of community
hospitals such as King/Drew in serving as a safety net for
thousands of uninsured patients, most of whom are poor and
minorities.
Of course, Kevin’s story is not the only one that has
often gone untold in the flurry of negative press the King/Drew
Medical Center has endured recently.
Whether it’s for an infection or a gunshot wound,
King/Drew is the only source of comprehensive medical care in a
community where many are uninsured. Hence, the examples I cite are
not exceptional.
But the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid say that the
quality medical attention these patients received at King/Drew is
the exception.
And as a result, the hospital will lose $200 million of its $380
million annual budget at the end of the year, unless funding is
restored.
A new plan by the L.A. County supervisors calls for King/Drew to
be converted into a 100-bed community hospital under the management
of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
It also calls for the medical center to be renamed the
Harbor/MLK Hospital, although the present name carries symbolic
significance in the community it serves.
Services would be retained for basic inpatient care and an
emergency room, but patients, some of whom don’t have a car
and are on fixed incomes, will have to get a higher level of care
at Harbor-UCLA, more than 10 miles away in Torrance.
If history can offer us any lessons, glance back only one year
ago to a study looking at hospital closures in L.A. County between
1997 and 2003.
According to the study, the closures overwhelmed staff and
facilities at the county’s four general hospitals, including
King/Drew.
The closures triggered a rush of patients to doctors’
offices, clinics and emergency rooms. It increased the time and
distance the patients had to travel.
In practical terms, that meant that fewer patients saw doctors,
fewer children had checkups, and there was a spike in the number of
deaths from unintentional injuries, heart attacks and other
illnesses.
These trends virtually guaranteed that the number of acute cases
would climb, and such ailments are more costly to treat ““
hence, the crucial role of preventative care.
King/Drew is the latest, but hardly the only, casualty of a
bloated health care system that has failed those who need it the
most.
There are nearly 50 million uninsured in the United States, and
3 million just in Los Angeles County. That’s the core of the
problem.
We don’t have an overarching system of health care in
America, but rather a patchwork of different plans that provide
some form of health coverage as a commodity ““ and often at
under-insured levels ““ to sectors of the public.
The government is the nation’s biggest health care
provider. It foots the bill for millions of elderly and disabled
Americans through Medicare and nearly millions of poor through
Medicaid.
In fact, even with record health care spending, patient
satisfaction on access to quality care hovers around 40 percent in
the U.S., compared to around 90 percent in Denmark.
Here at home, the facts cannot be any clearer: In the past 30
years, more than one-third of all public hospital beds have been
lost. Yet, during this same period, the number of uninsured has
continued to soar.
King/Drew is a textbook example of the staggering numbers. The
hospital provides sustained care for more than 10,000 patients, and
it treats nearly 170,000 outpatients.
It is only one of two hospitals with emergency rooms in South
Los Angeles, and one of only four hospitals to serve a population
of more than 1 million. By comparison, in West Los Angeles, there
are seven hospitals for a population of 620,000.
The bottom line is that while the debate over the future of
King/Drew will undoubtedly continue and major changes may be
necessary, it is important to remember that to a majority of its
patients, the hospital may be imperfect, burdened with a great
responsibility and flawed, but it has been an integral part of this
community since the 1960s.
Ultimately, the underlying problems of access to and disparities
in health care are ones that we must face and address as a
generation of tomorrow’s leaders, regardless of whether we
enter a health care field or not. As Martin Luther King Jr. once
said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health
care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Shefizadeh is a 2006 UCLA alumnus. He is the founder and
president of the Undergraduate Medical Sciences Organization and
Students for Organ Donation.
