Hospital history

3/16/23 https://easyreadernews.com/letters-opinion/

Dear ER:

There aren’t very many people who remember the story of the South Bay Hospital District. The hospital district was formed to build and run a hospital for the residents, not the entire area. So voters bought land, paid for the hospital, and paid all the bills and workers from the 1950s until 1984. The hospital lost money all through the 1970s and had to be shut down in 1984 or go broke. Fortunately a private company rented the hospital, cleaned house and kept some of the services running as a private hospital until 1998. Beach Cities is just South Bay Hospital with a name change in 1994. Even though they no longer had the public hospital, the board of directors decided to keep the taxpayer money and land and do whatever they wanted. The health district no longer meets a single one of the requirements that voters approved when they approved the hospital. It doesn’t own or operate a public hospital and it’s become a commercial business that works outside the voters’ cities. I understand that the district wants to get bigger and bigger, since that’s what government agencies do. What I will never understand is why the district continued to exist when so many of us protested in the 1990s to either keep the hospital running or shut it down. They seem to have created some sort of private company that no longer works for the residents.

R A Loeffler

Hermosa Beach