Thread by @RichardHanania

Why care about merit? What harm is there in affirmative action programs that reward the less qualified?

Here's the story of the Martin Luther King Jr/Drew Medical Center (King/Drew) in Los Angeles, which operated from 1972 to 2007.

Or as patients called, it "Killer King." 🧵

The hospital was founded in 1972, in response to black riots of the late 1960s. Elites in LA, like elsewhere in the country, determined that racism was the cause of pathologies in the black community.

Therefore they decided to open up a hospital to serve locals.

Officially, as a public institution, it couldn't be a "black hospital." But most employees and administrators were black, and it was said to belong to the community.

California schools practiced massive affirmative action at the time, and graduates would go work at King/Drew.

Problems appeared right away.

In 1975, the LA Times reported on "horror stories implying neglect and incompetence."

Employees were said to be drunk on the job or on drugs stolen from the hospital pharmacy.

A letter from a nurse in 1977 gave it the moniker of Killer King.

Nothing was done for decades.

It took an LA Times report in 2004 to reveal how things had gotten.

According to one accreditor, the hospital had "problems of orders of magnitude that are substantially greater than almost all other hospitals in this country."

King/Drew spent $20.1 million on malpractice payouts from 1999-2004. Adjusting for the number of patients it saw, this was the worst figure of any hospital in the entire state of California.

Patients would come in with minor medical issues and end up dead.

Locals would run away from ambulances in order not to be brought to Killer King.

Police officers had an understanding that if their colleagues were shot, they would not allow them to be taken there.

Once, a nine year-old daughter of Guatemalan immigrants was hit by a car. She had minor scrapes and a few broken teeth, and her parents thought should would be out before long.

But the girl wouldn't survive Killer King.

First, they gave her enough sedative to sedate a grown man.

They then needed to hook her up to a ventilator, but the settings were wrong.

She was starved of oxygen, and then for unclear reasons a doctor had her breathing tube removed.

Staff failed to monitor her condition.

The girl was soon brain dead and had to be taken off of life support.

The family settled with the hospital for $195,000, and as of 2004 was planning to build an alter at her grave in Guatemala.

In 1992, a sheriff's deputy was taken to the hospital with four gunshot wounds. Joking with nurses when he arrived, he was dead two days later. The surgeon had given him a lethal combination of heart drugs.

In 1994, a woman went to Killer King for a hysterectomy. She got a blood transfusion that had tested positive for AIDS, but nobody had bothered to check.

The hospital tried to discourage a doctor from letting her know, but he did anyway.

Community activists complained that King/Drew didn't have enough funding.

In fact, it got more funding per patient than the other three general hospitals in Los Angeles County.

Where did that money go? Overpaid employees, many of which became famous for their creative disability claims.

"Between April 1994 and April 2004, employees filed 122 chair-fall claims at King/Drew."

The hospital spent $3.2 on claims of employees falling out of chairs alone.

Once, a cashier was getting married. Her supervisor found out that she hadn't been asked to a bridesmaid.

The supervisor got mad, and the cashier said this gave her stress.

Killer King paid the cashier $216,000 on that claim.

A male nurse was tending to a semi-conscious patient having a leg operation. 20 minutes in the surgery, he reported being slugged in the back by a female colleague who knocked him to the floor.

King/Drew was expected to pay him more than $500,000 for back and neck injuries.

It wasn't just the lower level staff. The nueroscience chief made $1 over two years. He appeared to do few surgeries, publish few papers, and got paid for times he wasn't at the hospital.

Once, he reported working 26 hours in a day, after spending 6.5 hours at the hospital.

In five years, Killer King spent nearly $34 million on employee injuries. That was more than any of the University of California medical centers, some of which were two or three times its size.

LA Times in 2004: "Some employees habitually fail to show up, logging weeks, even months, of unexcused absences each year. And those who do come to work often don't do their jobs, causing one consultant in 2002 to remark that they had 'retired in place.'"

"King/Drew pays its ranking doctors lavishly. Some draw twice what their counterparts make at other public hospitals - often for doing less. Eighteen King/Drew physicians earned more than $250,000 in the last fiscal year, including their academic stipends. Harbor-UCLA had nine"

In the hallways of Killer King, employees would sell peanuts and bootleg DVD.

Patients would sit in their hospital beds, being ignored as hospital staff sat out in the hallways talking about parties they'd been to and the movies they'd seen.

Once, a nurse ordered a janitor aide's to mix up IV medication for a critically ill patient.

According to Civil Service records, the janitor aide's job only required him to recognize "a limited number of two- and three-syllable words."

The nurse lost her license.

One resident, Warren Lemons, was fired when he couldn't get licensed in California

Later, he was found barricaded in a room with a deaf-mute patient. Lemons had baby oil and soft restraints

When he was later arrested for killing a man, police found videos of naked male patients

A 28 year-old man died when the nurse who was supposed to be watching him had silenced the alarm on his vital-signs monitor.

She also falsified his medical charts, claiming that he was in stable condition an hour after he had died.

Why was nothing ever fixed? Remember, the hospital was called "Killer King" in 1977, and it lasted 40 more years after that, until 2007. You won't be surprised to learn that community activists denounced those who tried to do anything as racists.

When LA County met to discuss closing the trauma center, Maxine Waters organized a demonstration that included Jesse Jackson, and grabbed the microphone as she took control of the meeting. Politicians were cowed into silence for decades.

One influential activist warned against a "Latino takeover" of the hospital, called the head of the county health department the "grand wizard," and referred to police as pigs.

Over time, the surrounding community became more Hispanic. Many of them illegal immigrants, they were generally unwilling to assert themselves.

Some already expected hospitals to do things like operate on the wrong leg, so they didn't see anything surprising at King/Drew.

Nonetheless, the LA Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on what was happening at Killer King in 2004. Under increasing pressure, the hospital was finally shut down in 2007.

In 2015, it was replaced at the same site by the MLK Community Hospital, a $200 million building.

While still serving the black community, the new hospital appears to have much lower ambitions than King/Drew. As of 2017, it didn't have a trauma center and avoiding hiring specialists or treating the most difficult cases. It focused on basic preventative and primary care.

Having learned nothing, since 2020 California schools have been announcing new DEI initiatives. We'll see what happens after the SCOTUS decision.

King/Drew shows what happens when you bring DEI staff together in one place. The problem is less noticeable when you spread them out

Everywhere you look in the medical system, once you let some people in through AA, you have to lie about everything.

In 2015, blacks were 5% of residents, but 20% of those kicked out of medical school. 2% of whites studying surgery were dismissed, and 12% of blacks.

From 2003-2013, the Medical Board of California reports that blacks were 2.7% of doctors but received 4.4% of complaints, among those whose race we know. Numbers are also bad for other groups that get AA. https://t.co/fi5iUSy3tqlibrary.ca.gov/wp-content/upl…

See here for the Pulitzer Prize winning reporting from the LA Times on Killer King. In 2020, the LA Times apologized for its previously racially insensitive coverage, so we're unlikely to see many reports like this again.
https://t.co/Ih2ftSbi9jpulitzer.org/winners/los-an…

The diversity ideology poisons everything it touches in a vicious cycle.

Incompetent doctors, race baiting politicians intimidating those who know better and protecting failed institutions. Now, a press that has become more openly committed to covering up inconvenient facts.

This is a reminder that, behind the statistics you see on racial realities and the harms of DEI ideology, there are real costs in terms of health, public safety, and ultimately the functioning of our civilization.

Let the memory of Killer King remain as a testament to that.

I’m going to do a series on these, so follow in order to keep up to date. Trust me, there are many more Killer Kings out there in practically all areas of American life.

UPDATE: I just found out that the reputation of Killer King was such that it made its way into a 1991 Ice Cube song.

🎵Woke up in the back of a trey
On my way to MLK
That's the county hospital, jack, ha
Where n*ggas die over a little scratch 🎵
https://t.co/dn5SGXiSEDgenius.com/Ice-cube-alive…

Its reputation for ignoring patients was well known. Next verse, they make Ice Cube fill out forms while coughing up blood.

🎵 Sittin' in the trauma center
In my back is where the bullet entered
"Yo, nurse, I'm gettin' kinda warm"
Bitch still made me fill out the fuckin' form🎵