Alternative Ideas for Fixing King/Drew

Re “Massive Overhaul of Ailing Hospital Urged,” Dec. 23: There are long-standing, serious problems at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. So The Times sought the opinion of two dozen healthcare experts and asked them for solutions. What were their recommendations?

(1) Ask the Legislature to create a separate body with control over the county hospitals.

(2) Appoint a separate oversight board for each of the county hospitals.

(3) Appoint an independent “surgeon general” to oversee all the hospitals.

There is not an original idea among the recommendations. The Board of Supervisors may be inept, but it must deal with the problems. Its responsibility cannot be delegated. To their credit the supervisors are at long last taking proper steps to resolve the well-known problems.

Major changes in personnel at the hospital will be necessary to improve care. Progress can quickly show up in the actions of supervisors and health department administrators -- in far less time than it would take to implement any of the misguided proposed solutions.

Tom Hibbard

Loma Linda

Hibbard was chief deputy to ex-Supervisor Pete Schabarum.

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Why should we believe that creating several more layers of bureaucracy and political patronage (a health authority? five health authorities? special commissions?) will improve the situation at King/Drew Medical Center when it is clear that the primary reason for the institution’s decline was the involvement of too many politicians in the first place? Whenever an issue arose, there were always a few members of the county Board of Supervisors, a few members of the City Council and many elected state and federal representatives who could be counted on to hold press conferences, or conduct televised community meetings, spouting platitudes but accomplishing nothing.

Why not just hire a strong health center manager and let him or her and the professionals at the Department of Health Services do their jobs?

Peg Manning

Los Angeles

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Your Dec. 26 editorial missed the most obvious and sensible alternative to the King/Drew debacle: outsource it -- privatize it -- contract it out. Your series said there was enough money to operate the facility, so let those in the private sector with the experience and inclination who already run the thousands of existing private, for-profit medical facilities just run it. How hard is that? County officials have proved they can’t run healthcare, so get them out of the business.

R. Allen Rickard

Fountain Valley