Vote Dr. Delaney Smith for County Supervisor 2nd District

I am a challenger for the seat of Los Angeles County Supervisor. Nearly all of the other challengers agree that the number one issue that is facing the county today, is the near collapse of it's health care delivery system of hospitals both public and private. I am the challenger that is best qualified to address these as well as the fiscal issues, and cuts in spending for education because of my broad background as an educator, physician, pharmacist, and businessman, who has personal experience in health care delivery system design.

The current county Supervisors openly admit, that they have no such training and therefore have wholly relied upon health care consultants and advisers, who charged millions of dollars for consultations, but oftentimes offered bad advise. I am a residency trained specialist in Emergency Medicine, and a Board Certified Forensic Examiner in Clinical Pharmacology. Pharmacists have formal business education related training and many hospital and corporate COOs and CEOs are pharmacists, which includes the current COO of University [USC] Hospital.

In 1983 I opened the first urgent care center in the greater Los Angeles area, the Baldwin Hills Medical Center. It is believed to have been the first such center in an inner city location. The original concept which evolved in the late 1970s placed such centers in upper middle income, suburban communities... as a means of accessing prompt, high quality medical care, without having to endure the waiting time and inconvenience of a hospital emergency room. As the founder of the concept that urgent care centers can thrive in urban centers, as County Supervisor...through public-private partner relationships with community physicians, I will implement the Super Urgent Care Concept of health care delivery system concept, in which urgent care centers will be associated with multi-specialty groups such as Internists, Cardiologists, Gastroenterologists, and Orthopedic specialist all available at one location.... as was the case with the Baldwin Hills Medical Center.

On any given day, 70 - 80% of patients that now present to hospital emergency rooms are ambulatory, and do not require emergency medical care. It is precisely this patient population that should be seen in cost efficient, state of the art urgent care centers, that are well equipped with laboratory, X ray, EKG, and a support team of medical specialists. This is the means by which medical care would be widely practiced in the future under my direction as a Los Angeles County supervisor. I have already proven over a 20 year period that this concept can work, and this approach will sharply reduce ER congestion and related problems due to the cost of seeing such patients in an emergency room setting which caused the closure of Los Angeles County Martin Luther King Hospital and a number of private hospitals throughout the entire county of Los Angeles.

In that the Candidates for County Supervisor that have appeared at Candidate Forums have all agreed that on day one, the number one problem that the new supervisor will face, relates to the issue of health care in an environment of reduced funding for health care services... We should elect nothing less a health care specialist to address the issues.

It is my contention that the county's government should be run more like a streamlined business, and I would immediately set about to identify and eliminate pockets of waste, in the county's multi-billion dollar budget, that would allow us to expand our health care facilities, educational opportunities, and jobs for our youth through a specific approach that is elaborated upon in my Platform [see below].

"Political paralysis" - is a condition that is suffered by politicians who indiscriminately accept support money from a variety of special interest groups, whose interests conflict, with the "common good" of the people who actually cast votes:

This candidate separates himself from all others.... in that at this time he is seeking financial support solely from individual voters, that include patients concerned with issues of health care, and health care providers that are concerned with the future of medicine that is threatened by poor reimbursement by insurance companies and the State of California Medi-Cal program.

Yes! Healthcare delivery in hospital emergency rooms, is quite expensive because they must be fully equipped and staffed 24 hours a day, 7days a week with highly specialized physicians and nurses, who must be able to quickly deal with life threatening emergencies at any given time without notice. If the patients presenting to MLK hospital had been triaged to community urgent care centers, the overcrowding and related problems would not have occurred if staff had to only deal with the 20-30% of patients who were appropriate for the hospital ER. The hospital should not have been closed, but rather the patients should have been appropriately redirected to lower level of care facilities as described above, and the 12 hour ER waits could have been immediately remedied.

Were the recent cuts to education, and healthcare by the state of California legislators justified, while at the same time calling for increasing expenditures for hundreds of millions of dollars for new prisons?

No! At the present time nearly two millions Americans are incarcerated across the country, at a cost of up to $100,000.00 per prison inmate. 80% of such incarcerations are somehow drug related. We can immediately save billions of dollars annually, by refocusing and implementing a policy and practice of drug rehabilitation instead of incarceration for drug users. As many as 50% of some prison populations have serious psychiatric illnesses, while the state hospital Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk California, which was created to house and treat the mentally ill... is now operating at only 25% of capacity due to reductions in funding.

Arresting officers who make the three strike designations, should be educated, that it was the intent of the legislature that these charges would be applicable only to violent criminal acts. All third strike case past and present should be reviewed by a public review committee which should have the authority to override the charges of an arresting officer when the charges are not consistent with the intent to the legislature.

The above measures would sharply reduce the present prison inmate population, at considerable savings totally billions of dollars that could be invested in our youths' educational programs, healthcare, and caring for our elderly as we are an aging population.

Yes there is tremendous was in Los Angeles County's foster care program, in that billions of dollars in federal funding has been paid to Los Angeles County in what one newspapers describes as a "cash for kids scheme" whereby over zealous social workers and county prosecutors are taking children out of families for a profit, when such children could have been left with a willing, responsible family member. The Federal Kinship Caregiver Act is federal legislation that became effective on October 1, 2007 to curb this kind of activity by counties across the country, in which Los Angeles County has been #1 for such activity!

40% of children in the foster care within the United States, are in California, and the majority of those arise from southern California.... and primarily from just two communities... East Los Angeles and South Los Angeles, at great human cost to these families and a tremendous burden to taxpayers! In Los Angeles county alone in 2006, there were over 76,000 children placed in foster care, and thousand have been lost within the county's own system. Federal reimbursement can be as much as $80,000.00 annually, and even more per child if they can be adopted out....within a specified period of time.

On their 18th birthday, with the expiration of federal allocations, many have received a present of $500.00, as they are shown the door... to the streets.... with no attempt to reunite them with their families. The lucky ones end up in jail, or on drugs, as others enter early graves in disproportionate numbers as compared to the general population:

Welcome!

Dr. Delaney Smith