Legislators Meet on Health Crisis

Legislators Meet on Health Crisis

Los Angeles Daily News
By Brent Hopkins
Staff Writer

Monday, October 04, 2004 - WESTWOOD -- Seeking to fix a fractured health care system, legislators, industry executives and policy advocates met Monday to debate alternatives to closing hospital emergency rooms.

Led by Assembly members Dr. Keith Richman, R-Granada Hills, and Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, the meeting was the first of five to be held throughout the state this fall. Drawing on input from Rand, its research division Rand Health, scholars, insurance companies, drug makers and hospital operators, the series of meetings aims to foster dialogue on a system nearly all regard as deeply flawed. With the information gleaned within, Richman and Nation hope to introduce legislation in the upcoming session to curtail double-digit health insurance costs, the increasing number of uninsured -- already more than 6 million in California -- and hospital closures.

"We can't put Band-Aid after Band-Aid while the health care system continues to hemorrhage," said Richman, a general internist before he entered politics. "This is a situation that requires us to address the fundamental problems."

In his estimation, those problems include insufficient access to insurance coverage, inefficiencies in the medical records system and a lack of consistency in hospital and insurer quality ratings. By the end of the daylong conference, held at the UCLA Anderson School of Business, participants aired many more grievances about all levels of health care.

Nearly all panelists agreed that the solution lay in universal health care; views diverged widely as to how to achieve it. Participants suggested mandatory standardized hospital quality reports, paying doctors more, increasing funding for nurse training and greater discussion with both workers and patients. While most suggestions involved longer-term legislative fixes, others took up lobbying for and against current ballot propositions, including Prop. 72 to mandate employer-provided coverage and Prop. 67, which provides funds for emergency rooms through a surcharge on telephone use.

"We need to fund health care," said Dr. S. Daniel Higgins, president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association and vice chair of St. Francis Medical Center. "As a county and as citizens, we can't afford to turn down any kind of money for health care. We had another emergency room close today and we can't wait for more. We've got to get money in there, then we can have these erudite conversations later."

Nation acknowledged that there were no easy fixes, with most solutions proving to be either politically or economically unpalatable. He suggested more collaboration between government and private entities, looking for tax plans that would enable single-payer coverage and determining how much coverage everyone should be entitled to.

"This is a problem that should have been addressed a long time ago," he said. "We'll work in a bipartisan manner in the next few years to get our arms around us and get it solved." -- Brent Hopkins, (818) 713-3738 brent.hopkins@dailynews.com