You Owe People a Budget Soon : * Sacramento: Just Do Your Job

Never let it be said that California legislators are at a loss for words to explain their needless deadlock on the state budget.

“They left us with a bag of dog doo on our doorstep, lit it on fire, rang the doorbell and ran away,” one Republican assemblyman told a reporter. Speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat, quipped back: “And we will not take it out of the bag. We will simply return it to its owners in its original form.”

What a pair of cards. But while they exchange their odd witticisms, people who are among the poorest, the sickest, the most defenseless of the state’s residents suffer as they wait for the state tax dollar to trickle down.

Los Angeles County USC Medical Center is one example of how the lack of definitive action hurts. The hospital is the linchpin in the county’s public health system. Poor and uninsured women in labor often line the hallways, flat on their backs waiting for overworked nurses and doctors to help them. The ones on gurneys are the lucky ones. Some just get hard chairs.

County USC hospital has now been placed on conditional accreditation by the nation’s major hospital review organization, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Conditional accreditation means that the hospital is, in effect, on probation until it improves its quality of care and safety.

The county hospital is not the only hospital to receive such a sanction and its problems are not limited to obstetric overload, although County USC delivers one out of every 200 infants born in the United States.

Its fall from grace with national reviewers was the shameful legacy of years of severe cutbacks in state and county budgets. And now, due to the Legislature’s inability to resolve this year’s budget, home-care workers, doctors and others who tend the poor under the state Medi-Cal program are not getting paid. And lest anybody think that all this is someone else’s problem, think again. Untreated communicable diseases know no income lines.

The courts provide another example of how squabbling in Sacramento translates to real problems. The $50-billion Senate version of the state budget--which, by the way, the Assembly has thrown out, to start all over again--cut trial court grants, money used to actually run the courts. Few items in the budget are likely to be spared the paring knife. But not knowing what the final budget will be precludes planning for a grossly overcrowded court system, where civil cases already take five years to go to trial and criminal caseloads have increased 151% in the last nine years.

So, we reiterate: The key to the budget this year is a reasonable mix of additional revenue and additional cuts. One relatively painless way to raise more money is to suspend the state tax indexing for inflation for a year. Sacramento should cut the quips. This is serious.