The Los Angeles Business Journal posted a storyon 1/11/05 about the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors plans to explore the idea of creating a separate health authority to run the county’s entire hospital system, acting on a scathing report on its management of troubled Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center.The near-unanimous vote at Tuesday's supervisor's meeting, opposed only by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, calls for a task force led by the Chief Administrative Officer to report back with a draft blue print in 90 days if possible.
The board has commissioned similar studies in the past, but Supervisor Don Knabe, who put forward the motion, said they were largely conceptual. This time he called for a detailed analysis that would answer whether or not such a plan was feasible.
Earlier this month, Navigant Consulting Group released a highly critical study of the operations at MLK that called for the board to consider a hospital authority. Navigant was hired by the board in October to take over day-to-day operations of the hospital at a cost of $13.3 million.
