Local News in Brief : Hospital Executives Form Lobbying Team

Angrily denouncing Los Angeles County for its unwillingness to continue bailing out the city’s financially troubled private hospital emergency rooms, executives of key private hospitals in Los Angeles said Tuesday that they are forming a joint lobbying group with downtown businessmen, community representatives, hospital administrators and physicians.

Calling the group the Los Angeles Emergency Medical Care Task Force, the executives said they will try to draw public attention over the next few weeks to the “rapidly deteriorating emergency medical services situation” in Los Angeles. Last week, county officials disclosed that, because of an unexpected shortfall in state funding, they were planning to suspend subsidies to key private hospital emergency rooms, raising the prospect of drastic cuts in emergency medical services.

California Medical Center, one of 11 inner-city hospitals having difficulty absorbing the economic losses associated with emergency-room care, announced in May that it may have to close its emergency room to public ambulances, which tend to bring critically ill patients, many of whom cannot pay for their care. If even one hospital emergency room closes, it would have a disastrous impact on all of downtown Los Angeles, a spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California warned.