Update: Nunez Appoints Health Care Panel Members

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Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, on Friday named the members of a special legislative committee that will focus on the health care crisis involving Los Angeles County’s public and private hospitals.


In a separate action, Assembly Mervyn Dymally, D-Compton, a committee member, introduced legislation that would create a health authority to run the county’s hospital system, which is not only facing a fiscal crisis but has been criticized for poor care, especially at Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center.


The Select Committee on the Los Angeles Health Care Crisis is being chaired by Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, and will tackle both the massive deficit facing the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and a separate series of private hospital closures.


“Six hospitals in Los Angeles County shut their doors in 2004 alone,” Nunez said in a press release announcing the appointments. “We must focus on this looming crisis and help make the County’s health care system financially viable.”


In addition to Ridley-Thomas, the committee will be comprised of 11 Los Angeles County Assembly members, including Dymally, Dario Frommer, Jackie Goldberg, Paul Koretz, Keith Richman and Sharon Runner.


Among the key issues: a projected $1.3 billion deficit that the health department is facing by 2008 when federal subsidies and other funding runs dry. The health department runs five public hospitals.


Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Healthcare Association of Southern California, a regional hospital trade group, said the committee could be useful if it helps focus legislators on the issue, and tackles real problems.


Among the possible targets: a huge disparity in Medi-Cal funding of private hospitals in Los Angeles County compared with hospitals elsewhere in the state.


“It’s 26 percent lower than the average,” said Lott. “We are talking about anywhere between $300 million and $400 million that (could be) coming into Los Angeles County.”


Lott traced the disparity to the start of private contracting for Medi-Cal payments in 1983, a time when there were big differences in labor costs between Southern California and the northern part of the state. That disparity no longer exists, he said, because labor is now just as costly here.


Meanwhile, Dymally introduced AB 201, which would create an 11 member Los Angeles County Health Authority that would run the hospital system. The supervisors, with the exception of Michael Antonovich, have been open to the proposal, recommended by a recent consultant’s report that looked into poor care at the Willowbrook hospital. However, the proposal could not move forward without state legislation.


“The present system, as we know it under the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, has not worked,” said Dymally, in a prepared statement. “It seems to me that the time has come to do something quite different. In my judgment, a health authority is not the total answer, but is one step in moving us in the right direction.”


The authority will consist of five members appointed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors; three members nominated by the governor; one member each nominated by the speaker of the Assembly and Senate Rules Committee, and one member appointed by the Health Authority from the Los Angeles community.


The governor’s three nominees shall consist of one member each from the University of California, University of Southern California and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

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