Health Cuts Will Result in Deaths, Supervisors Told

With an occasional blast at Gov. George Deukmejian, scores of witnesses--from recovering alcoholics to hospital presidents--testified Monday that if nearly $27 million in health cuts are approved, care will decline and lives will be threatened in an already deteriorating county hospital system.

One by one, 66 witnesses urged the Board of Supervisors to take funds from elsewhere in the county budget or impose new taxes to maintain health services. The county is faced with the prospect of reducing the level of care because of Deukmejian’s vetoes last week of nearly $70 million in additional money for Los Angeles County.

In sometimes emotional testimony, the board was told that the cuts would, among other things, exacerbate a current nursing shortage, result in longer waits for treatment and might even lead to serious health problems.

“Let me state this categorically. I do believe that if the Board of Supervisors votes for these proposed cuts, people will die,” said Geraldine Dallek, co-author of a recent report for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles that was highly critical of the county’s health system.

Sees No Room for Cuts

“I have looked over carefully the whole list of cuts and I don’t believe that one service, one employee can be cut without doing great and grave harm,” Dallek said. She suggested asking voters to approve a sales tax increase as a source of additional health care funds.

While the board postponed any decision until at least Aug. 11, Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon proposed Monday that about $10.7 million of the health care cuts be restored from a $30-million discretionary pot of money set aside by the state for the county. Dixon’s plan will be part of the board’s consideration of a $7.2-billion proposed county budget this week. The added health money would keep seven public health centers open and fund several hundred hospital beds that had been slated for elimination.

Under Dixon’s plan, the county’s health care system would still face $16.4 million in service cuts ranging from outpatient care at four hospitals to drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics scattered throughout the county. Lack of funding would also curb or eliminate some dental and ambulatory care services.

The plan also might provide some relief to the county’s troubled trauma network. Most of the network’s private hospitals are re-evaluating their participation because county hospitals are accepting the transfer of fewer indigent patients after private hospital emergency care. Dixon’s proposal would not mean additional county hospital beds, but neither would it reduce current levels, he said.

Dixon’s proposals--submitted to the board Monday morning--were unknown to the hundreds of people who gathered for the state-mandated hearing. Just before the hearing, many of them had gathered outside the Hall of Administration near a black coffin symbolizing the “death” of county health care.

Noting Deukmejian’s vetoes and surveying the crowd in the hearing room, Supervisor Ed Edelman, a Democrat, won hearty applause when he took a swipe at the Republican governor.

“I think (Deukmejian) owes an explanation to the people in this room because here we are sitting here having to take the responsibility of hearing the consequences of these cuts,” Edelman said. “We have to sit here with our hands virtually tied behind our backs.”

“The person who should be sitting here is the governor of this state,” Edelman said.

For the most part, most of the witnesses confined their comments to specific cut proposals, whether involving a major county hospital, the county’s trauma network, a neighborhood clinic or a drug detoxification program.

William Haug, president of the privately run, nonprofit California Hospital Medical Center, said the proposed cuts would affect both private and public health care. As public health funding is cut, many private hospitals are forced to pick up the slack, he said.

“When county health care facilities reduce or eliminate services, the need for those services does not disappear,” Haug said.