Labor Rally Targets County Health System

Organized labor entered the fray over who will fund Los Angeles County’s massive public health system as more than 120 workers and patients rallied outside a county clinic Thursday demanding the extension of a key federal waiver that has allowed the system to remain solvent.

It was largely through the political muscle of the Service Employees International Union that the Clinton administration granted a last-minute $1-billion bailout in 1995 to stave off the county’s looming bankruptcy. The county long expected that relief, in the form of a waiver of Medicaid rules, would be extended before it expired in June 30 of this year.

But with talks involving the county and state and federal health officials stalled for the past three months, county unions sprang into action Thursday with the first of what they said would be multiple public demonstrations until the waiver is renewed.

“How many of you remember 1995?” SEIU Local 660 President Alejandro Stephens asked the crowd outside the H. Claude Huson Comprehensive Health Center just south of downtown Los Angeles. “We saved the system” then, he said to cheers from union members with signs reading “Don’t Waver on the Waiver.”

“We’re going to do the same thing this time around,” he said.

Without the waiver, the county would face a $250-million budget deficit that it could probably close only by cutting back already meager health services to the county’s nearly 3 million uninsured.

“At [Harbor-UCLA Medical Center] people die waiting for a liver transplant, people die waiting for cardiac treatment, while waiting to qualify for Medi-Cal--and that’s with the waiver,” said Dr. Angela Nossett, president of the Joint Council of Interns and Residents, who works at the South Bay county hospital and explained that it did not have facilities needed to treat all the ailments.

Union officials corralled patients leaving the clinic, workers and physicians to sign postcards to be sent to Gov. Gray Davis, President Pro Tem of the State Senate John Burton (D-San Francisco) and Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), urging them to help extend the waiver. The federal government has demanded that the state pay part of the waiver cost this time around. So far the state, despite a $13-billion surplus, has not allocated any money for the waiver.

Labor has been pushing for the waiver extension for months but recently, as the situation has become more grim, has been taking a far more active role. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO and the former head of SEIU, reportedly introduced Vice President Al Gore at SEIU’s annual convention in Pittsburgh last week with a pointed reminder about his role in securing the original waiver.

Stephens said he was optimistic the waiver would be renewed in the next couple of weeks, and word late Thursday was that the county, federal and state government officials would meet Monday for the first time in three months. “We are strong, strong Gore advocates, and the Clinton-Gore administration is strongly dependent on labor support,” he said.

Still, the concern is palpable. County supervisors last week declared an impasse and have frozen all new health spending as of July 1 if the waiver is not extended.

“With budget surpluses in every branch of government . . . we are, nevertheless today facing the prospect of plunging the second-largest public health care system in the country back into another crisis,” said Annelle Grajeda, SEIU Local 660’s general manager. “This can only be described as a monumental and outrageous failure on the part of our elected officials.”

“We need medical care,” said Alva Delgado, a 58-year-old unemployed grandmother who has been coming to Hudson for four months to get her diabetes treated.

Lark Galloway Gilliam, the director of Community Health Councils, summed it up, she was upset “that we’re standing here after five years. The question is what are they doing in Sacramento and Washington?”