King/Drew Medical Center: Reparations Paid Back In Blood
On August 17th an experiment in reparations came to an end. Experts say we may never know for sure just how many paid with their lives or their health.
In 1965 the country watched as riots tore through Watts, burning through businesses and splashing the pavements with blood. When the anger finally subsided the city of Los Angeles brought together its leaders and sought a way to answer the concerns of the black community. Kenneth Hahn, a white politician with daunting skills saw redemption in the building of a hospital in Watts. In 1975 it opened, a shining testament to hope and heroism. It was named the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center. It was to be run by black Americans, staffed by them and of service to the black (and ultimately Hispanic) community that lived around it. “That hospital means hope to us,” said Karimu McNeal, 52, an African American woman treated successfully for colon cancer at King/Drew in 2002. “When you go into the hospital and you see people that look like you and take care of you, it gives you hope for the whole race that we’re achieving and doing something.” Ironically, the pride inherited with the cement and steel that formed the building would not allow for the board of supervisors, hospital administrators or the doctors and nurses within to address the deadly incompetence that ruled its halls from the its first days.
“They told me to relax,” Sulma recalled. “Everything was fine.”
At least, it should have been.
“He looked at me,” Elias Tasejo recalled. “He kept walking.”
Cases like Dunia’s began only three years after the hospital opened. Botched operations, inattentive care by untrained nurses and callous disregard by doctors led to a series of accidental deaths and injuries. Malpractice lawsuits mounted, far out pacing competing hospitals, but the board of supervisors concern was met by a hostile activist community who saw any attempt to address the problems as racist attacks. “We see something that we fought really hard for,” said Dr. Herbert Avery, 71, an obstetrician who helped plan the hospital and served briefly on its staff. “And now it’s being driven down under the ground under the guise that the people out there … they’re black and Mexican and they’re too stupid to run a hospital and a medical school.” The five supervisors; Zev Yaroslavsky, Gloria Molina, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Don Knabe and Michael Antonovich spent years treating tragic stories and willful incompetence with calls for more studies, even as King/Drew failed inspections and lost government contracts. The hospital soon took on the nick name “Killer King” by those it served. Firemen and policemen refused to be treated there after one of their own, Nelson Yamamoto, a 26-year-old sheriff’s deputy, was mistakenly injected with a lethal combination of heart drugs as he lay recuperating from gun shot wounds. A study in 2002 found:
Those that frequented the medical center talked of hospital staff fighting each other, hawking electronic equipment in the halls, prescription drugs being stolen and sold on the street, and nursing staff ignoring pleas for help, choosing instead to gab with each other or sleep through their shifts. When a patient finally did get a nurse’s attention, the care was shoddy and offered with malice. A veteran management consultant Leonard Fuller was hired to assess the employees at the hospital. Some employees, he wrote, “feel that they have little incentive to do more than ‘the absolute minimum to get by.’ ” Another nursing expert, Jean Ann Seago, talked about the widespread problems throughout the hospital. “If it’s sort of the general culture of the whole hospital, oh my God,” said Seago, “Somebody needs to get a grip on the situation.”
The well publicized death of Edith Isabel Rodriguez, 43, who died after writhing on the emergency waiting room floor in excruciating pain with a perforated bowel, has broken the sordid story of the King/Drew Medical Center wide open. Witnesses said that nurses and doctors walked around her, and even the janitor mopped up the bloody vomit around her rather than offer any assistance. Weeks later the hospital failed a Medicare/Medicaid inspection and its federal funding was cut. The hospital closed on August 17, 2007. After 3o years of lethal care, it finally fell on its own, brought down by the restless ghosts of those killed within its walls.
Every attempt to address the murder and mayhem disguised as health care was met with political cowardice and racial pandering. The motley crew that challenged attempts to enforce quality were called “the Community.” Many of them were unknowns, but some made a living stripping the dignity from those who had suffered as slaves and outcasts in our history. Maxine Waters dismissed stories of malpractice. Jesse Jackson brought tears to the eyes of supporters - not for the black victims of King/Drew, but for the victims of white racists who give tax cuts to the wealthy. Dr. Xylina Bean, in charge of the neonatal department, ironically answered concerns about King/Drew with “It’s based more in a concept that poor people do not deserve, just because they’re poor, the same level of quality of care that the rest of the world requires. You can call it racism if you want to, because it does tend to reflect upon specific people who just happen to be African American or just happen to be Hispanic.” Another hysterical Afro-Activist was Ernie Smith, who inflamed tensions by warning about a Latino takeover of the hospital. He called Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, head of the county health department who happened to be white, the “grand wizard,” and the black administrators that supported change “old hog-maw and sauce-eatin’ Negroes.”
So lives were sacrificed to grease the wheels of racial grievance, driven by hustlers who were all too willing to cheer on their bloody compatriots inside the medical center named for the man they claimed to revere. The bloody hands are many, from city hall to the city streets, crawling like a macabre funeral march where the corpses of those thrown away carry aloft their own coffins, stuffed now with the bitter legacy of racial paranoia. White guilt surely played a role, but who can dismiss that African Americans were handed the lives of their community to care for and chose instead to treat them as bad as any klansman bent on their destruction? If the administrators were white, the doctors and nurses white, such callousness and wanton cruelty and criminality would have been charged a hate crime.
And the proof that ‘the Community’ would rather pile up the corpses than allow competence to trump color is that the hospital was forced to close rather than reform. It was not the doors and the windows that killed and maimed patients, it was an administration and its gang of vindictive employees that preyed on the sick and injured. USC refused to be associated with it. UCLA refused to send its interns or its doctors there. To every professional the solution was obvious: fire the incompetents and restaff the medical center. But that couldn’t be allowed to happen, the hospital was meant to serve as a racial spoils system - victims be damned. It is our shame that no one was willing to take the political risk to face down the mob.
The sad example of the King/Drew Medical Center is a good enough reason on its own to reject any demands of reparations. Such a thing offers nothing to those paying the fine, and only condemns those who crave what they cannot buy. Remember the victims of Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center - they have already been forgotten by too many of their own.
Please take the time to read the Los Angeles Times five part series written in 2004 about the King/Drew Medical Center. It won a Pulitzer prize, and documents years of lethal incompetence.
