December 8, 2004

Party of the Bureaucracy

The Los Angeles Times's ongoing series on King-Drew medical center shows an unmitigated disaster:

Earlier this year, a consulting group tested King/Drew's nurses and determined that at least one in five could not pass competency tests.

Nursing expert Jean Ann Seago, who reviewed King/Drew's nursing citations for The Times, said she'd seen rampant problems before with one hospital unit or one rogue nurse, but never throughout an institution.

'If it's sort of the general culture of the whole hospital, oh my God,' said Seago, director of the UC San Francisco nursing administration program. 'Somebody needs to get a grip on the situation.'

The series describes not just a hospital where people make mistakes. Some mistakes are inevitable. It describes a corrupt charnel house where most of the victims are African-American.

Nevertheless, Democrats and "civil rights activists" in the area have spent more energy defending the hospital than seeking to protect the people hurt by mismanagement and incompetence.

A good illustration of the fact the Democratic party is, above all, the party of government employees and bureaucrats, in the King/Drew case with an overlay of race-based patronage.

The party's kowtowing to the teachers' unions and opposition to most school reforms other than pumping in more money, is a similar pattern. Who cares if the patients aren't cured and the children don't learn?

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