Health care fails to meet demands
October 9, 2006
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, Kevins 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 its 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 dont 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 countys 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. Thats the core of the problem.
We dont 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 nations 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 tomorrows 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.
SOURCE : 2007 ASUCLA Student Media