When I read Ashish Jha’s new study about the poor quality of some hospitals caring for the elderly and poor, I kept coming back to the former King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Jha, an outstanding Harvard University researcher, found that “The nation’s 178 “worst” hospitals—the lowest-quality, highest-cost institutions—care for more than twice the proportion of elderly minority and poor patients as the nation’s 122 “best” hospitals, where costs are lowest and quality highest,” according to a press release from Health Affairs. 

“What’s more,” the release continues, “the patients at the worst institutions are more likely than patients elsewhere to die of certain conditions, such as heart attacks and pneumonia. And these hospitals and their patients may be the ones most at risk under new Medicare payment arrangements that could cut payments to hospitals that fail to meet quality metrics.”

Why does this matter? In 2004, my colleagues and I at the Los Angeles Times wrote about how King/Drew had betrayed the community it was created to serve. Here’s what we found in the first article of our series, The Troubles at King/Drew:

•  Errors and neglect by King/Drew’s staff have repeatedly injured or killed patients over more than a decade, a pattern that remains largely unscrutinized and unchecked. Some lapses were never reported to authorities — or even to the victims or their families. And some people learned of the severity of the failings only by suing or, in several instances, from Times reporters who sought them out to learn about their care.

•  Although King/Drew opened in 1972 with the promise that it would be “the very best hospital in America,” it is now, by various measures, one of the very worst. It pays out more per patient for medical malpractice than any of the state’s 17 other public hospitals or the six University of California medical centers.

•  Entire departments are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality. Employees have pilfered and sometimes sold the hospital’s drugs; chronic absenteeism is rampant; assaults between hospital workers are not uncommon. Despite King/Drew’s repeated promises to regulators, the problems have gone unfixed for years.

•  The hospital’s failings do not stem from a lack of money, as its supporters long have contended. King/Drew spends more per patient than any of the three other general hospitals run by Los Angeles County. Millions of dollars go to unusual workers’ compensation claims and abnormally high salaries for ranking doctors.

•  The hospital’s governing body, the county Board of Supervisors, has been told repeatedly — often in writing — of needless deaths and injuries at King/Drew. Recently the supervisors have made some aggressive moves aimed at fixing the hospital. But for years, the board shied away from decisive action in the face of community anger and accusations of racism.

King/Drew, founded in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots, has stood for more than three decades as a symbol of justice and political power to many black people in South Los Angeles and beyond. In reality, if not officially, the hospital was established by and for African Americans; the majority of its staff always has been black.

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Both Jha’s study and our stories on King/Drew point to the same basic problem: Society accepting subpar care for poor people that we would not accept for ourselves or our families. Communities across the country should care about the quality of their hospitals before they reach the crisis stage that finally closed King/Drew, then renamed King-Harbor, in  2007.