Re “Olympia Medical Center to Close in March,” Jan. 7 issue

Thank Edwin Folven for his excellent article demonstrating that all our elected officials were clueless concerning the plan to shutter Olympia Medical Center.

How could those and other county health officials let St. Vincent [Medical Center] or a decade ago, Century City Hospital, close?

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 balanced the federal budget by manipulating the Medicare growth curve to be below real inflation. Hospital administrators attempted to insulate themselves from this market manipulation. As the number of Medicare and Medicaid patients has grown, cost pressures forced hospitals to increase revenues, decrease supplies and lower nursing/patient ratios. Cars have seat belts and airbags not because we are planning to be in accidents, but just in case. The costs of those safety measures being added to our vehicles are equally passed on to all consumers.

Not so with hospital costs. By creating price controls, Congress has created a hidden tax on employers and purchasers of health insurance, causing hospitals to limit competition and maximize efficiency to stay profitable. For too long, hospitals that predominantly have relied on Medicaid and Medicare have cut corners, underpaid and overworked their staffs and understocked supplies to balance their budgets. People have been dying for years because of these policies. COVID-19 blew up those systems. As the smoke is clearing, we see that the overwhelming number of American deaths were either nursing-home residents or patients in chronically underfunded safety-net hospitals.

Unfortunately, in L.A. and other major cities, these are the hospitals serving the poor and people of color. The original county hospital built in 1933 had 3,000 beds, yet our current hospital, which opened in 2008, has only 600. Our population has grown from 2.4 million to 10.2 million in the same period.

The question that should be asked of the Board of Supervisors and our other civic leaders is, “knowing that there has been a bed shortage in L.A. for 15 years, why didn’t they either build a bigger hospital or buy at bargain prices those that came up for sale, or both?”

Dr. Howard C. Mandel

Los Angeles

President of the Los Angeles Health Commission