Feds pull funding for L.A. hospital in poor neighborhood

Feds pull funding for L.A. hospital

By ROBERT JABLON, Associated Press Writer

Sat Aug 11, 2:09 AM ET

Federal regulators said Friday that they are pulling $200 million in funding

from a troubled hospital that serves one of the city's poorest

neighborhoods, forcing it to all but shut down.

The decision came after the county-run Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor

Hospital failed two federal inspections.

At a news conference late Friday, Los Angeles County's chief medical officer

told reporters that the hospital would close its emergency room Friday night

and that patients would be moved to other hospitals within two weeks. The

emergency room was closed at 7 p.m. Friday.

"We brought every resource to bear, but in the end it just wasn't enough,

fast enough," Dr. Bruce Chernof said.

King-Harbor will remain open 16 hours a day, seven days a week, to offer

outpatient care to people with routine medical problems, Chernof said.

Ambulances will be available to take the more seriously ill to other

hospitals.

During the past few years, Los Angeles County tried to improve patient care

through disciplining workers, reorganizing management, closing the trauma

unit and reducing the number of inpatient beds to 48.

Yet Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator for the U.S. Centers of Medicare

and Medical Services, said a federal inspection as recently as last month

found "conditions at the facility have placed the health and safety of

patients at great risk."

"While some progress has been made, significant problems persist," Kuhn said

in a statement.

The federal agency plans to end its hospital provider agreement with

King-Harbor on Wednesday. The hospital can apply for reinstatement, but that

would take three to four months because federal regulators would want to be

assured that King-Harbor's problems have been corrected.

The federal action means the hospital is no longer eligible for

reimbursement for the costs of caring for Medicare patients. The county has

warned that loss of the funding - about half the hospital's budget - would

force King-Harbor to close.

King-Harbor, which has about 1,600 employees, handled about 50,000 emergency

room patients last year. A contingency plan is already in place to shift

patients to other hospitals, and officials have said they would try to find

a private operator to take over the facility and reopen it, perhaps in a

year.

"This is good news because it brings closure to this never-ending saga,"

county Supervisor Michael Antonovich said in a statement. "It allows the

county to move forward in bringing quality medical care to an area where the

status quo chose to keep a bag over their head."

The hospital was built after the 1965 Watts riots to bring health care to

poor, minority communities in south Los Angeles. In recent years, poor

patient care has been blamed for several deaths.

A woman died in May after writhing untreated on the floor of the emergency

room lobby for 45 minutes. In February, a brain tumor patient languished in

the emergency room for four days before his family drove him to another

hospital for emergency surgery.

The hospital failed a federal inspection in September 2006 but managed to

remain open under a reorganization that shifted services to Harbor-UCLA

Medical Center and reduced inpatient beds from 250 to 48.

The second inspection last month found that the hospital still had failed to

comply with federal standards in eight of 23 areas, ranging from nursing

services to patients' rights, according to a letter to King's administrator,

Antoinette Epps.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070811/ap_on_he_me/troubled_hospital_5