There’s been a lot of grumbling from the hospital industry over the years about SB 1953 (1994) and regulations issued in the early 2000s mandating the state’s acute care facilities meet certain seismic standards between 2013 and 2030 or shut down.           

Congress may have rejected a public plan option for private health insurance coverage, but the California Legislature gave it new life with its passage of legislation to implement the federal health care reform laws.

Make no mistake about it; the Obama Administration gets it! Without reform, including cost containment, health care will grow from 16 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product to 25 percent over the next 15 years.

In the mid-1960s, women comprised less than 9% of the nation’s medical students. Their ranks nearly tripled within a decade, and they doubled once again in short order, topping 40% of all students throughout the 1990s. Earlier in this decade, women briefly became the majority of all medical students. This shift is all the more remarkable given the number of medical school slots in the U.S. has not changed much in the past 30 years while the number of overall applicants has increased.

After only two weeks in limited release, Michael Moore’s Sicko achieved the rank of being in the top five documentaries of all time. That’s too bad, because a documentary it is not. Rather, it is one long campaign commercial for replacing our pluralistic, market-driven health care delivery system with a government-run, single-payer system.

In California, hospital construction is also being spurred by SB 1953, the mandated seismic upgrades to the state’s acute care facilities that could cost as much as $60 billion to complete. A recent report by RAND concluded that “only a fraction of California hospitals will be able to marshal the financial, organizational and logistical resources to carry out large-scale construction programs to meet the law’s deadlines.”

Scientists from all over the world came together earlier this month and in one powerful voice told us that we human beings broke our planet. They urged us to stop questioning the existence of global warming and to begin implementing known and proven strategies to mitigate the problems that a 4-to-5 point rise in worldwide climate temperatures in the near-term will cause. Hopefully, world leaders will listen and begin to do the real work needed to sustain life on earth.

We need a similar reality check with regard to reforming our health care delivery system in California and the U.S. Our system neither provides for the efficient access to health care that 6.5 million uninsured Californians or 47 million uninsured Americans need, nor is it able to sustain the twice-to-thrice annual health care cost growth to overall inflation ratio that will soon cripple our ability to do much about improving access for anybody.

The race is on! Not since 1992, when President Bill Clinton turned over the task of building a universal health plan for all Americans to Hillary, has anyone in the know felt that a major health care access and restructuring plan was forthcoming. Given the results of last month’s election, though, once again the pundits believe that real change is coming.

Though it is the association’s policy not to comment on criminal investigations, “we are dismayed by the City Attorney’s decision to use his prosecutorial authority against hospitals to address the problem of homelessness,” said Jim Lott, Executive Vice President. “It seems to be a rather excessive, pernicious approach to solving a problem that hospitals have agreed needs to be addressed and are addressing,” Lott continued.

Though no statistics are kept on the numbers of homeless treated by hospitals, 76 hospitals with emergency rooms are the medical safety net for the estimated 80,000 homeless residing in the county, including the almost 1,200 who congregate on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. In fact, these hospitals are required by law to receive, treat and stabilize any of the County’s almost 3 million uninsured residents who present with life-threatening illnesses or injuries, and they meet this obligation at a collective financial loss of approximately $1.6 billion annually.

Move over, 007. You’re not the only one who has a license to kill. We allow the tobacco industry to spend about $29,000 each and every minute of the day to market the only consumer product proven to kill more than half of its regular users. Smoking is responsible for 90 percent of all lung cancer, 75 percent of chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and 25 percent of ischemic heart disease cases. These facts are not refuted by cigarette manufacturers. “Yes, we agree that smoking cigarettes, including our brands, causes lung cancer and other serious diseases in smokers,” Thomas Dubois, Director, Corporate Affairs, Phillip Morris Australia, reportedly said in 2002. Tobacco use causes 8.8 percent of all global deaths and 4.2 percent of disability.

The national nursing shortage is well documented and has been felt acutely throughout our country’s hospitals. What is especially troubling is that if nothing is done to remedy the problem, the national supply of registered nurses will remain virtually unchanged by 2020. In contrast, the demand for nurses will soar by 2020: the 6 percent shortfall could grow five-fold to 29 percent.