LOS ANGELES – Prosecutors filed criminal charges against a major hospital company accusing it of dumping a homeless patient suffering from dementia on the city’s crime-plagued Skid Row, the city attorney said Thursday.
“They have violated every ethical obligation under which they operate and they have also broken the law,” city attorney Rocky Delgadillo said in announcing the charges.
Police have long suspected that medical centers and outside law enforcement agencies were using the neighborhood as a dumping ground for the homeless. Skid Row already has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of homeless people, in part because of its cluster of shelters and services to help them.
In the case against Kaiser Permanente, a 63-year-old patient from its Bellflower hospital was recorded on surveillance video in March wandering Skid Row in a hospital gown.
“Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, part of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the nation, will be held accountable for violating state law, its commitment to its patients, its obligations under the Hippocratic oath, and perhaps most importantly, principals of common decency,” Delgadillo said.
The legal action was the first in Los Angeles and experts said it appeared to be unprecedented nationally.
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