They’re Shocked! Shocked!

The crisis at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center is dismayingly familiar, right down to the cries of ostentatious indignation coming from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “They make these ... findings that the place is going to hell in a handbasket,” thundered Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky last week, referring to the federal inspectors who paid a surprise visit to the county-operated hospital two weeks ago. “Why did they know that and we didn’t?”

What didn’t the supervisors know, and when didn’t they know it? The critical inspection followed years of bad news, including loss of national accreditation for two of the medical center’s 18 doctor-training programs in the last few months. It was prompted by the deaths last summer of two patients who deteriorated undetected despite being hooked up to heart monitors. And these were hardly the first cases of either shoddy training or botched care. They all could have been ripped from the headlines -- of Times stories from 14 years ago.

“The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Tuesday ordered a health department investigation of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in response to what they described as ‘serious charges of substandard health care,’ ” said a Times story in 1989. “Audits and management reviews of the hospital have repeatedly pointed out serious operational weaknesses at King that threaten the hospital’s accreditation and jeopardize patient care.”

Those weaknesses -- poor management, inadequate supervision and, yes, deficient oversight by the Board of Supervisors -- continue to be cited today. Not much, it seems, has changed, including the supervisors’ hackneyed professions of shock and outrage.

The newest flood of bad news has pushed health department Director Thomas Garthwaite, hired two years ago to keep the county’s health-care system from being capsized by budget deficits, to turn his attention to the tsunami threatening King/Drew. He installed acting managers from other county hospitals and assembled a task force headed by former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. The recommendations, expected this week, need to put patients ahead of the politics that have for too long dictated the relationship between the county hospital and the private medical school.

Both were founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots to train minority doctors to serve South L.A., Compton and other then mostly black communities. Latinos now outnumber African Americans in the area, and competition over jobs and political “ownership” of King/Drew complicates the already challenging task of treating some of the county’s poorest and sickest patients.

For all its get-tough talk last week, the board for years deferred to Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, whose district includes the medical center, rather than risk an honest civic discussion about the quality of patient care.

For years, the board went along with the type of incremental changes that Yaroslavsky and others railed against last week and tweaks in management that led to complacency and it tolerated crises. And for years the supervisors also resisted the pleas of experts to create a specialized health-care authority to better oversee the county’s complex health-care system. Now they are indignant at being held accountable for that system’s failures.

“You know, constantly they come back and they say, ‘Well, the governing body is responsible,’ ” Burke whined.

Well, yes. Someone has to be.