With Los Angeles County supervisors expected to sign off next week on plans to partner with the University of California to reopen the Martin Luther King Jr. medical facility, the hard work—creating a new hospital from the ashes of the old by 2013—begins. In many respects, the partnership with UC would wipe the slate clean, creating a nonprofit company overseen by a seven-member board of directors who would decide how to run the facility and whom to hire—a key issue to critics who cite the county's poor history of dealing with problematic employees at the Willowbrook hospital. County supervisors closed King to all but outpatient care after the facility failed a make-or-break inspection that meant the loss of $200 million in federal funds. The final failure came after repeated findings that inadequate care had led to patient injuries and deaths.
