Editor’s note: This story has been updated and corrected.
Financially struggling Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital has received a funding infusion up to $32 million from Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente.
The funding is split between a $25 million grant to bolster emergency services and an in-kind donation worth up to $7 million for modular building capacity to relieve overcrowding, Kaiser Permanente announced last week.
MLK Community Hospital has emergency room capacity to accommodate roughly 25,000 emergency room visits per year; the hospital is currently seeing about 125,000 emergency room visits per year, or five times the existing capacity. This has resulted in excess emergency room patients being handled in makeshift tents adjacent to the hospital building.
Expected Medicaid cuts
In recent months, MLK Community Hospital administrators have warned that starting next year, the hospital expects to lose up to $100 million a year in funding when federal cuts to the Medicaid program begin to take effect. With an operating margin last year of just 1%, administrators warned that the hospital can’t handle cuts of that magnitude and may be forced to close.
Earlier this month, administrators took their case to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, seeking a change in the funding formula for the Measure B parcel tax enacted by voters in 2002 to fund hospitals with trauma centers. Because it has no trauma center, MLK Community Hospital has received very little of those funds.
