Trauma

There's a big stink over the imminent closure of the Trauma Center of the twentysomething MLKJr Hospital down in the ghetto. It would be the 6th Tramua Center closed in LA County in the past couple of years. The others were due to budget irresponsibility, this is due to incompetence.

It seems to me that if a hospital is incompetent, the ER should be the last thing you close down. It's the thing the community needs the most. Not just because its a ghetto, but because most people don't need to be hospitalized, they just need to see a doctor. On the other hand, if you've been critically injured, there's no quicker way to kill you than in an incompetent ER.

So the question is would you rather see an incompetent doctor who is 10 minutes away or a competent doctor 40 minutes away. That depends on where you've been shot or how small your automobile was when it wrecked. The LA County Board of Supervisors, whose call this is, are going for quality over quantity, and hoping beyond hope that more people don't get wrecked or shot.

It's a crapshoot.

One thing I've learned as I've followed this is that the more ERs you close, the higher the murder rate of the city goes. More people die who might have lived.