Care Is Still the Pits at Money Pit King/Drew

Whether you live in Watts, Beverly Hills or the Antelope Valley, the chronic failure of Martin Luther King Jr./ Drew Medical Center is costing you a fortune.

For decades, hapless Los Angeles County officials have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the second-rate hospital, trying to bring it up to snuff. And yet the results are always disastrous, up to and including last week’s notice that King/Drew had flunked an inspection by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and will lose $200 million a year in federal funds.

So what else is new?

What follows here is just a partial tally of the recent drain on the county treasury:

In 2004, things got so dreadfully bad the county turned the hospital near Watts over to consultants and paid them more than $17 million for 18 months of work, only to have L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich call the firm’s performance a “dismal failure.”

Between 1999 and 2003, the county spent $20.1 million on malpractice payouts to King/Drew patients.

When the cardiac monitoring ward was closed in 2003 because of a third questionable death, the county hired a consulting firm and paid it roughly $1 million.

Last year, the county allocated $63.8 million for infrastructure improvements and refurbishing of operating rooms and psychiatric wards, bringing us to last week’s notice that the hospital has failed to meet minimum standards in nine of 23 areas.

In short, the place is a sinkhole for your money. And although there have no doubt always been good and dedicated employees fulfilling a noble mission, the hospital has long had a rotten culture of sloth because of civil service protection and weak-kneed politicians who feared that cracking down would bring cries of racism.

And so the hospital that represented a triumph for social justice when it opened in 1972 following the 1965 Watts riots has turned out to be a monument to incompetence and political paralysis. Those who paid the biggest price, of course, were the neighborhood residents -- minorities, most of them -- who were too poor to have any other healthcare options.

And yet given this history of shame, the first words out of L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s mouth after the latest disastrous news were about continuing “to work with the Department of Health Services to keep KDMC open.” She went on to say she has “total confidence” in the county health director and the King/Drew CEO.

One question:

Why?

I visited the hospital Tuesday and couldn’t help but notice the sign out front, which has Burke’s name plastered on it along with the boast that the hospital has provided service to 4 million people. Is it just me, or does that sound a little too much like a hamburger ad?

I’d like to suggest a small addition to the sign. It ought to say they’ve treated 4 million people, “some of whom are still alive.” To name just one example of horror movie medicine, seven patients were virtually ignored to death over a two-year stretch when hospital staff failed to keep an eye on vital-sign monitors.

And Burke has total confidence? She should have taken this latest report card down to the hospital and whacked administrators over the head with it.

The options now being considered by the board are to turn King/Drew into a clinic, try to sell it, or try yet again to fix problems despite having failed miserably in every previous attempt.

My vote is for the supes to sell the hospital if they possibly can, and if not, to pay someone to take it. The only drawback would be that any clock-punching King/Drew hack with enough civil service protection could bounce over to another public hospital and try to poison the culture there, too. But maybe they’ll shape up when they’re finally surrounded by people putting in an honest day’s work.

At King/Drew on Tuesday, I spoke to a patient named Mary Fradiue, a Watts resident who said she has reluctantly used the hospital since 1980, when she was shot by thugs while standing in her frontyard.

The hospital opened to great hope in a neglected neighborhood, Fradiue said, but she claimed it didn’t take long before the place “went to the dogs,” with filthy bathrooms, mediocre treatment and notoriously bad attitudes.

Fradiue said she’s had medical problems since the shooting, and has hoped with each round of negative publicity that the hospital might finally become more professional and show a little respect for its original mission. But in May, she said, she spent several days in the hospital while receiving a blood transfusion and felt like she’d been forgotten by the staff.

“I kept waiting to see a doctor, day after day,” she said. “A lot of the employees here are very rude.”

Fradiue wants the place to continue operating as a hospital, because there’s nothing else close by. If that means a sale to a private company, so be it. However it gets done, she said, business as usual has got to end.

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.