From IMDB here is the plot summary to Robin Cook’s seminal movie “Coma”:

A young woman doctor discovers something sinister going on in her hospital. Relatively healthy patients are having ‘complications’ during simple operations and ending up in comas.

Sound familiar? At Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, the situation is so screwed up that a few healthy people ending up with comas wouldn’t even raise eyebrows. We’ve reported its well-documented problems here. Since those postings, cases of malfeasance and gross negligence seem to have become a daily occurence.

In the latest inspection of the hospital, federal officials cited several major medical errors, including a patient who waited to be seen in King/Drew’s emergency room for more than 13 hours without a medical screening. He later died of a dissecting aneurysm — a tear in a weakened blood vessel.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors who are responsible for operating the hospital have finally figured out that they might need to kill the patient in order to save it. Amen.

As reported in the LAT (who has done a commendable job of investigating the many deadly defects at King/Drew), a vote could take place as early as August, and at least three of the five supervisors — Mike Antonovich, Don Knabe and Zev Yaroslavsky — express some support for the idea.

Said Knabe:

“The only way” to completely fix King/Drew, he added, “is to shut it down for a while, to get new people in there, and to change the culture of the entire hospital.”

Of course, these are the same pols who are falling over themselves to out-spend and out-politic eachother on the county’s homeless issue, so don’t hold your breath for a solution that doesn’t play well in the newspapers.

If the Supervisors end up being too weak to pull the switch on King/Drew then federal Medicare agency may have to do the job. If they are not satisfied that the hospital is fixing its problems, it can cut off $200 million in funds to the hospital, which would effectively close it.

Using another movie example, like the house in Amityville Horror the King/Drew hospital is the site of demonic forces terrorizing those unfortunate enough to have been sent there. In the movies, people eventually figure out the building is so evil that it must be destroyed. Let’s see if the Supervisors are that smart.

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If you liked this story, you might enjoy Independent Sources posting on a case of Federal Housing Authority mismanagement.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 9:00 am by Insider and is filed under California Schemin', Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.