No Mention of the UCLA Health and MLK Community Hospital Relationship?

The LA Times reports that the Martin Luther King Community Hospital is running out of money. There is no mention in the article, however, about the partnership between UCLA Health and MLK. From the Times:

MLK Community Hospital, a crucial safety-net facility serving the South Los Angeles area, may run out of money to pay its bills as soon as next year, hospital leaders are warning. The nonprofit hospital, which was established to replace the closed King/Drew Medical Center, lost more than $42 million in the budget year that ended in June, according to officials at the privately run facility. The Willowbrook facility was established with a unique funding system that included supplemental payments from the state and county government to keep the hospital afloat. But the funding formula has failed to keep pace with inflation and a steep increase in staffing expenses, among other shortcomings, MLK leaders said. The end of federal aid that had been given to hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic was another blow, they added.

One of MLK’s biggest challenges is the fact that its emergency department has been deluged with four times as many patients as initially expected. That’s a problem because Medi-Cal, the California Medicaid program, does not fully cover the costs for providing emergency services, hospital leaders said...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-10/mlk-financial-trouble.

From UCLA Health:

...In 2009, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and University of California regents approved a plan to build a new hospital to replace the King/Drew Medical Center. Infrastructure funding would come from the county, staffing and quality oversight from UCLA Health and a private, nonprofit team, Martin Luther King, Jr. Los Angeles Healthcare Corporation, would oversee the hospital’s operations. By 2015, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital was fully operational, with Dr. Batchlor, a physician with a Masters in Public Health from UCLA, at its helm.

In several interviews, Dr. Batchlor emphasized her focus was improve the health of the whole community.

That focus is what inspired Dr. Hamid Nourmand, MLKCH Chief of Staff and UCLA professor of clinical liver transplant anesthesiology who began his career working with underserved populations, to come to MLKCH. He would help lay the groundwork for the hospitals’ relationship. When he first signed on as Secretary-Treasurer of the medical staff, one of his early tasks was to join hospital leaders in ensuring licensure certification.

Although the certification was anticipated to take at least five days, it concluded within less than half that time. “At the end of the second day, we gathered downstairs in the lobby and heard we were granted the licensure to open the hospital,” says Dr. Nourmand, now medical director of the MLKCH Anesthesiology Department and chief of the UCLA-MLKCH Anesthesiology Program. “Many of the people who I worked with at the time, they were crying with pride and happiness.” ...

Full story at https://www.uclahealth.org/news/mlk-community-hospital-ucla-health.

Although the Regents and UC have no responsibility for the MLK budget, one might expect some concern about the situation from UC. The Regents' Health Services Committee is meeting next week on an executive pay matter, but no item on MLK is included.