A City Where Hospitals Are as Ill as the Patients

[flashl]

LOS ANGELES — The patients line up at 6:30 a.m. outside the tidy clinic. Two hours later, when it opens, they will sit and wait some more.

There are 22-year-olds, holding neat piles of pills on their laps, small children whose mothers try to distract them with plastic rattles, elderly immigrants who sit silently, staring at nothing in particular, until their names are called.

And there are nearly 70 percent more of them walking into the clinic, the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Compton, since nearby Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital closed last summer.

For thousands of residents of South Los Angeles who had depended on the large county-run King-Harbor hospital, the past 10 months have been a grueling exercise in cobbling together medical care. When King-Harbor was shut by federal officials, it became the 15th general acute care hospital to close in Los Angeles County since 2000, about half of which served residents in South Los Angeles.

Washington Post

[midnight]

1. Only one term comes to mind when I read this=

Commassionate Conservatism.

[mac2]

3. Orwellian term for "you are on your own".

[mac2]

2. Where is Dr. Albert Switzer when you need him?

It is so sad that we are becoming third world.