Closures of emergency rooms in L.A. County

Re “L.A. County May Lose 10th ER,” Aug. 28

Ambulances in Los Angeles County are currently turned away from overcrowded emergency rooms nearly 25% of the time, and walk-in emergency room patients can wait hours -- sometimes many hours -- to be seen by a physician. And if the ER at Centinela Freeman HealthSystem’s Memorial campus in Inglewood closes, the problem will only get worse. Replacing ERs with urgent-care centers is not the solution. Where will the 16,000 “severe” patients Centinela treated last year go?

The economics of emergency care are difficult, but access to high-quality emergency care is threatened in Los Angeles. Emergency medicine is in crisis, and until national attention is focused on the problem, nothing will change. Minutes count when lives are on the line, and time is running out.

ROBERT S. HOCKBERGER MD

Emergency Medicine Chairman

Harbor-UCLA Medical Center

Torrance

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Doing its usual politically correct dance, The Times conspicuously fails to state the root cause for the closures of so many L.A. County emergency rooms for financial reasons: the free use of emergency rooms as the “family doctor” by illegal immigrants.

DONALD HIRT

Paso Robles

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After hearing of the imminent closure of yet another emergency room, it occurred to me that this country is bleeding to death from self-inflicted wounds. There is not enough money available for healthcare, education and healing parts of our nation that have been devastated by natural disasters.

The real tragedy is that the billions of dollars being thrown into a military quagmire in Iraq are not only unnecessary but have turned most of the world against us. If all these billions were turned inward and distributed in a humanitarian fashion, we would be a beacon for the world instead of a blight.

RUSSELL BLINICK

Chatsworth