Panel Sees No Easy Answers to Health Care Cuts

Members of a task force created to help steer Los Angeles County out of a looming health care crisis emerged from their first meeting Monday with deep concerns about the county’s budget predicament--and no quick solutions.

“I don’t believe that this crisis task force will be able to find magic bullets,” said J. Duffy Watson, chief executive officer of Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Santa Clarita, one of five members of the panel, appointed by the county Board of Supervisors last week as a way to postpone painful choices in health care cuts until at least next month.

The Health Crisis Task Force has been directed to generate specific alternatives to Chief Administrative Officer Sally Reed’s proposed Draconian budget cuts as well as look into the possibility of a broad restructuring of county health services--all by July 25.

To close the department’s $655-million budget gap, Reed has recommended shutting County-USC Medical Center and eliminating 12,627 jobs.

“I do not expect that we will find alternate sources of funding that are going to solve the problem,” Watson said after the two-hour meeting at the Hall of Administration, “or that we are going to find major ways to reduce [a health department shortfall of] $600 million to $1 billion that are going to be painless. . . . We will, in the end, please almost no one.”

One of the panel’s first actions was to appoint former Assemblyman Burt Margolin as chairman. Margolin, during a long Assembly career, authored some of the most important health legislation passed by the Legislature in recent years.

After the brief organizational meeting, Margolin said the panel’s mission is “to make the numbers add up in a way that protects the most vulnerable populations in this county and preserve the most important services.”

“The board is facing a horrendous budget crisis,” Margolin said. “This is the worst it’s ever faced. There is no more cushion, there is no more reserve. . . . They are up against the wall.”

Other members of the task force, with each of the five county supervisors making one appointment, are Dr. Raymond G. Schultze, the retiring director of UCLA Medical Center; Jane G. Pisano, vice president of external relations at USC, and Thomas J. Collins, chief executive officer of Long Beach Memorial Medical Center.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the only supervisor to show up and greet the new panel members, said: “The board has put a lot of trust in this group, and rightly expects some results.”

Also Monday, the county’s largest employee union unveiled the first of several TV ads that it will air as part of an effort to save as many as 18,255 mostly union jobs threatened by the county’s unprecedented $1.2-billion budget deficit.

In stark black-and-white images, the ad shows workers digging a grave next to a tombstone with Los Angeles County’s name on it. The ad, part of a $500,000 multimedia campaign, will air starting today, when the county supervisors resume deliberations on the budget deficit. They will make their choices later this summer.

The Service Employees International Union Local 660 is releasing the ads under the umbrella group “Emergency Coalition to Save Los Angeles,” which union officials say includes business, civic and labor leaders all concerned about how the county will solve its fiscal dilemma.

The unfolding media campaign appears to be following a script outlined in internal memos obtained by The Times. The strategy outlined in those documents was for the union--which represents more than 40,000 county workers--to form a “civil-sounding organization” that would transform the debate from one about saving union jobs to one of how the financial well-being of the entire county rests on how the Board of Supervisors seeks solutions to its fiscal problems.

The campaign aims to link Los Angeles with symbols of urban decay such as Newark and Detroit, implying that lost county jobs and services will affect the quality of life for everyone in the county, in part by driving business away.

“If you’re a business owner or a concerned citizen, call your county supervisor now. Before it’s too late,” the ad’s voice-over says. “Stop the cuts that will cause an economic crisis.”

Times staff writer Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.