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LOS ANGELES – For more than six decades, Alice Harris has lived on a block deep in the heart of Watts, a neighborhood long troubled by segregation, unemployment and low access to basic services, including health care.
“If you got shot, by the time the ambulance got here and takes you over to Torrance, California, downtown, you was already dead,” she said.
In 1965, after years of rising racial tensions and resentment over scarce public services, the streets around her went up in flames as residents destroyed their own community.
“They needed jobs, and they needed medical facilities in this area,” said Harris, who added that several children died from asthma-related symptoms, simply because the closest medical care facility was too far away. “If you want to kill a community, kill the medical care; that kills the community.”
A 101-page investigation on the riots, commissioned by the governor, noted that insufficient and inaccessible medical care were among the causes. Harris remembers Gov. Pat Brown traveling to Washington to help Watts get a hospital.
“That’s how we got Martin Luther King Hospital,” she said.
In March 1972, Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital opened its doors to a long-neglected community that had seen too much suffering – and too little care.
“The children didn’t have to suffer no longer,” Harris said. “Whatever happened, if you get to Martin Luther King Hospital, you’re going to live. We had the best trauma center in the world. And it saved lives.”
The opening of the hospital was a point of pride for an area that desperately needed it.
“The Martin Luther King Hospital was a very important step forward,” said Mark Ridley-Thomas, who sits on the county board of supervisors and represents 2 million people in South LA, including Watts.. “It was a way of saying that the Watts uprising was, frankly, something that could have been – and should have been – avoided.”
In the 2000s, horror stories of patient neglect, medical incompetence and avoidable deaths began to emerge. The once-promising facility became known as “Killer King.”
The final straw came in 2007. That May, a video emerged of Edith Rodriguez suffering on the floor of the emergency room, vomiting blood and screaming in pain. She'd been to the hospital three times in three days, complaining of abdominal pain. Staffers ignored her and a janitor even cleaned the floor around her, Rodriguez's boyfriend and patients called 911, but dispatchers weren't going to send medical help to a hospital. Realizing she had an outstanding warrant, police began to take her into custody, but she stopped breathing. Within 90 minutes of coming back to the hospital, she was dead. Her family later reached a $3 million settlement with the hospital
Her death quickly became a rallying cry within the community and around the country about the low quality of care at the hospital.
“It was the accumulation of instances of medical malpractice,” Ridley-Thomas said. “And these are comments that a lot who were there, who worked very hard to do the best that they could, do not wish to hear. But the facts are what they are, that patients were being compromised.”
Later that year, the hospital was closed, causing new pains for Watts residents.
“With [the city] closing it, it looked as if Martin Luther King had died again,” Harris said. “That really hurt.”
It was clear that the community needed the hospital that had been so tough to open in the first place.
Ridley-Thomas saw firsthand how the voices in the community wanted – and needed – a new hospital for underserved people.
“We’re not going to have another riot,” Harris recalled people saying about efforts to re-open the hospital. “Not going to do that. [We’re] going to find a way to get that hospital back.”
Last month, the community’s wish was answered. After an eight-year hiatus, a smaller Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital opened on the campus of the old one. Dr. Mitchell Katz, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said the new MLK Hospital is “built on a completely different model than the old hospital." It’s also one that was inspired by Obamacare.
"Under the Affordable Care Act, one of the things that was recognized is if you want to expand access, you have to also bring down the cost of health care," Katz said. "The best way to do that is to provide people with the care they need in the right place at the right time."
The new hospital is part of a revitalized medical campus that offers preventive care. Now, about 950 patients are served at the outpatient facility every day.
For Watts residents, such as Harris, the new hospital is a point of pride once again.
“We got something that Beverly Hills doesn’t have,” she said. “They don’t [have] nothing that big and nothing that pretty.”
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