On Oct. 29, the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation announced it would give a $100-million underwriting guarantee to the proposed partnership between L.A. County and the University of California to reopen the Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in south Los Angeles.
The proposed partnership would reopen the 120-bed hospital for inpatient care by 2012. King Hospital’s inpatient care was closed in 2007 as a result of losing federal funding due to gross violations that included substandard conditions and people dying in waiting rooms.
Since being closed, the hospital has only operated clinics and urgent care but offers no emergency services.
“The underwriting guarantee provides a layer of protection for the UC from any financial liability,” said Aurelio Rojas, communications director for Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. “If there is any kind of financial shortfall, this money would fill in; it’s an insurance.”
L.A. County has committed $353.8 million to the proposal, which requires the University of California to provide all medical staff for the hospital and establish standards of care.
The UC Board of Regents decided in October that L.A. County would have to obtain additional outside funding in order to make the plan financially viable, according to a spokesperson for the Soon-Shiong foundation.
Ridley-Thomas then contacted Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a former UCLA Medical Center surgeon who has become a billionaire by investing in biomedical technologies and anticancer drugs.
“When Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital closed, it left an already underserved community without access to adequate health care,” said Soon-Shiong, the founder of the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, in an Oct. 29 statement.
The mission of the foundation is to improve the quality of health care in the U.S., minimize the differences in care for people of different economic backgrounds and reduce health care costs by using new technologies, Soon-Shiong said.
“This is one example of (the foundation’s) commitment to address issues related to access to health care and the needs of the medically underserved,” said John Stobo, senior vice president for health sciences and services of the University of California Office of the President.
The UC Board of Regents will be meeting Nov. 17 to 19 at UCLA to vote on the partnership.