SUPERVISORS TO BLAME FOR MLK MESS.

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

DURING the entire dreary saga of Martin Luther King-Harbor Hospital, formerly King-Drew Medical Center, L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke repeatedly vowed that King would close over her dead body. It was eye-grabbing hyperbole, but it was also a sincere, impassioned plea to keep the embattled hospital open.

Now that King is in its final death throes, the inevitable hunt for culprits to blame is on. But that hunt need go no further than the supervisors themselves. Los Angeles supervisors squandered millions of taxpayer dollars on wasteful studies and ineffectual private management consultants. And they held perfunctory hearings that rehashed the same problems. All the while, they bitterly complained about King's rotten management -- a management that they approved -- and did little to hold those officials accountable. When public furor rose to fever pitch over King's lapses, the supervisors' only answer was to jettison staff and ax entire departments.

But none of this was necessary. The U.S. Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services threatened to yank more than $200 million in funds from King hospital last September for deficiencies that were imminently correctable: Two employees didn't wash their hands before they handled food and treated employees, an employee botched the dosage of medication, a pump in the intensive care unit wasn't properly cleaned and maintained. The centers also called King on the carpet for doctor and nurse training as well as emergency-room snafus. None of this was a surprise to the supervisors. The feds and the L.A. County Department of Health Services cited virtually the same problems in separate reports in the two years before. At that point, the supervisors could and should have undertaken a crash operation to rid the hospital of problem employees, implemented a staff-retraining program and upgraded the faulty medical equipment.

The supervisors could have appealed the decision to defund and/or apply for reinstatement. They rejected that.

And it was a big mistake. As it turned out, the feds still demanded they make the corrections in order to get federal funds to run a downsized King, and to protect then-Harbor General's accreditation. That was necessary because the supervisors grafted King's operations onto Harbor Hospital.

But this wasn't done. And the dangling and unanswered question is, why wasn't it? Since the supervisors have never satisfactorily answered that question, others have filled in the blank with all sorts of wild and wooly inflammatory rumors.

The supervisors, they say, are in cahoots with private developers to grab the land and build pricey condos or turn it into a chic, for-profit hospital that caters to the rich. Others claim the failure is part of a genocidal plot to get rid of poor blacks and Latinos. Still others claim that it will be plowed under and turned into an industrial development park. It's nutty, loose talk, but in the absence of an explanation from the supervisors that makes any sense, the screwball theories will continue to fly.

The far more likely answer is a lackluster mix of inattention, indifference and ineptness on the supervisors' part.

The thousands who rely on King hospital for basic health care and emergency services will pay a dear and a steep price for the supervisors' failure to deal with very correctable problems. And they won't be the only ones. So will county taxpayers. The embattled emergency room that drew national attention and rage after the botched death of Edith Rodriguez treats nearly 1,000 patients a week. Those patients aren't going to magically stop getting sick or shot or having accidents. They'll have to go somewhere for treatment. Ultimately, taxpayers will have to foot the bill for those thousands of sick and medically indigent the county will dump into emergency and treatment rooms at private hospitals.

Much of the media painted a bleak Dickensian picture of King hospital as a filthy, crumbling facility where patients died on the operating table, while callous, untrained, incompetent staffers routinely ignored them. This was grossly exaggerated. The hospital undeniably had big problems, but so do many other hospitals, even the well-heeled. And they manage to solve them.

That it will be shuttered for deficiencies that the supervisors could have corrected is disgraceful. The supervisors have a lot to answer for on this one.