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Life & Times Transcript
07/14/05 This Life and Times health care special is made possible by a grant from QueensCare, a public charity providing health care to the low-income and uninsured residents of Los Angeles County. Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- So you think having medical insurance makes you immune to the health care crisis? Think again. Carol Meyer>> I waited six hours for definitive care for her in one of the major emergency rooms in this county. Val>> And then, our FilmWeek critics fish on rivers of chocolate -- [Film Clip] Val>> Con men who crash weddings -- [Film Clip] Val>> And a group of dysfunctional Southern Californians. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val>> There's a problem in our emergency rooms. More and more specialists like surgeons are refusing to do ER duty. It's a growing problem and it's putting patients at risk. So why don't they want to show up at the ER? We talked to one woman whose daughter ended up in Critical Care for lack of a specialist. Paige Gunther>> "And we took all the papers and we went on in and --" Carol Meyer>> -- "Yeah, went into the ER and I carried your arm into the ER. I'll never forget it." Val>> Paige Gunther is now twelve years old. Two years ago, she was roller-skating in her Long Beach neighborhood when she took a bad fall. Carol Meyer>> I looked at her arm and immediately I saw the deformity of her wrist and I knew that she had broken it. Val>> Carol Meyer is Paige's mother. She's also a nurse and knew it was a bad break. She rushed her daughter to the nearest emergency room. Carol Meyer>> And they put us in a chair and we sat and we sat in a line of people that were also waiting. Paige Gunther>> It was very crowded. It was very noisy. Lots of kids. All I can remember was just me walking in there and seeing just a bunch of doctors. That's all I can remember. I remember sitting down and just kind of waiting there for about probably an hour and then I got put on a bed and got my arm held up. I probably waited there for about six hours until a doctor finally came. Val>> During the long wait for an orthopedist, ER doctors gave Paige pain medication. At the end of those six hours and after the specialist had set her arm, Paige had had so much pain medication that she was admitted to the intensive care unit. She wasn't released from the hospital until the next day. Carol Meyer>> You know, we had a wonderful outcome. Paige's arm is good and it's strong today. She had no complications. But the fact that someone has to go to an intensive care unit for a fractured arm is pretty unlikely in most situations. Val>> Carol knows what she's talking about. She's not only a nurse. At the time of Paige's accident and still today, she heads up one of the largest emergency medical services agencies in the country. Carol Meyer>> I was the, you know, director of one of the largest EMS systems in the United States. I had insurance, I knew the ER doctor that walked in and I had a child who had an injury that wasn't a matter of life and death, and I waited six hours for definitive care for her in one of the major emergency rooms in this county. Dr. Mark Wellisch>> "Oh, it's not quite healed." Val>> Dr. Mark Wellisch is an orthopedist. He's been in practice for thirty years. He's also a spokesman for the California Orthopedic Association. He admits getting specialists to be on call for emergencies can be a problem. Are you on call for the ER? Dr. Mark Wellisch>> No. Val>> Why aren't you? Dr. Mark Wellisch>> Well, first of all, because I don't want to be. Second of all because I'm a little old. And third because our group as a group has a policy not to take calls. Val>> The reason behind that policy is simple. Dr. Mark Wellisch>> Because it hasn't been very remunerative and it's been dangerous for us, liability-wise. Val>> The problem of specialists refusing to show up in emergency rooms is more complicated and it starts in crowded ER waiting rooms like these. [Film Clip] Val>> Increasingly, the uninsured and under-insured are turning to emergency rooms for all of their medical care. And even though there are panels of specialists who are available for on-call duty at emergency rooms around the county, the decision to be on a panel is voluntary. Here at St. Francis Medical Center where sixty thousand patients are treated in the ER every year, there is only one orthopedist on staff willing to take ER calls. Dr. Mark Wellisch>> "And good afternoon. How are you?" >> "Okay." Dr. Mark Wellisch>> "How's your ankle today?" >> "The ankle still hurts." Dr. Mark Wellisch>> In the past in years gone by, panels were a wonderful thing to do as a new young doctor in a community. You built your practice from the community of patients that came to the emergency room and needed your care. They came to your office subsequently and became your patients and became the families to which you provided care for the rest of your practice days. Val>> But these days, many of those patients can't pay or can't pay enough. Carol Meyer>> The reimbursement rate for on-call physicians is oftentimes so small because one out of every three patients in Los Angeles County is either uninsured where is there is no form of reimbursement or possibly the patient could apply for a county program or be eligible for a county program or the patient has Medi-cal or Medicare, which is truly an uninsured program. Dr. Mark Wellisch>> Our concern today is, in order to run an office, you need to have enough money coming into the office to pay the salaries for everybody that you're employing, their healthcare, their 401(k), make sure that you have splints and plaster and x-rays and all the things that are necessary to provide in a modern orthopedic practice. Most of those patients from the emergency room can't help you do that. Val>> Sometimes treating a patient in the ER doesn't end in the ER. The patient may need follow-up care and that means going to the specialist's office. That was a good thing thirty years ago when Dr. Wellisch was building his practice. Not so today. Carol Meyer>> There is no reimbursement for patients who are uninsured for any type of aftercare through a physician's office, for example. Dr. Mark Wellisch>> For a variety of people that are called to the emergency room, their patient contacts vary. If it's a plastic surgeon, he sews up Mrs. Gladrocks' face and the sutures come out in four or five days and their encounter is over. But if Mrs. Gladrocks breaks her ankle at the same time, then I have to put a cast on in the emergency room, x-ray her in my office, change her cast, rehabilitate her, make sure she can get back to dancing like she did when she broke her ankle. Or if Mrs. Gladrocks is Mrs. Sadrocks, then I assume all the obligations unless there's some way to make me whole for that. Val>> And if she's uninsured? Dr. Mark Wellisch>> Then I eat everything. Val>> Although there's a measure of this shortage, one thing is clear. It's especially impacting care in the inner city where populations are sickest and least able to pay. Carol Meyer>> There is no way to quantify what is happening, but I can tell you that I believe people are dying and I believe that people are having consequences of the delays that we have in our emergency rooms today. But, no, I cannot quantify that. And let's face it. What hospital is going to say this patient died in my emergency room or my waiting room because they waited too long? I think that it's going to get worse before it gets better and I think that part of the problem is I really don't believe the public understands this. Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times". Val>> Would you believe that, back in 1781 when Los Angeles was first settled, of the forty-four original settlers, more than half were African-American? Well, since then, the black community has grown and some have prospered, but there are also plenty of challenges ahead and today at USC a major study was revealed on The State of Black Los Angeles. This study was a joint project of United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Urban League. A panel of Los Angeles's top leaders gathered to discuss the findings, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Bill Bratton. The report found that the general quality of life for African-Americans in Los Angeles lagged behind whites in virtually all areas, education, jobs and income, criminal justice and health. At the same time, it found that eight percent of blacks are earning $100,000 or more and blacks rate highest for civic engagement like voting or military service. I talked with Elise Buick, President of United Way of Greater Los Angeles. So what would you say is your biggest single challenge? Elise Buick>> One thing that was referenced today was the fact that we've seen these statistics before, which is a little depressing. We know a lot of the solutions, so what's going to make the difference? Dr. Frank Gilliam from UCLA said he thinks it's public wealth. Personal philanthropy is important. We all have things that we give to. I am a working mom. I give to my son's school. We have issues that have touched our lives where we've lost a parent to cancer. But we also need to make sure we have community philanthropy, that we're investing in the community, and I think that's United Way's biggest challenge. Donors want choice and they want control, but we also play a role in saying we also have to be giving back and giving and investing in the community if we want this to be a vibrant place to live and work. I heard an interesting viewpoint that said that we have term limits in the public sector now. We have a short-term view in terms of corporate America trying to hit their numbers. So really the nonprofit sector is the one that has the long-term view. Val>> John Mack has the long-term view as well. He's the recently retired Executive Director of the Urban League. He has served that organization for thirty-seven years. One of the challenges, for example, is that forty-four percent of black students don't finish high school in four years. John Mack>> Clearly when you talk about education, there's no question that LAUSD and public education has not served African-American students well at all. Really, for that matter, not served Latino students. We have decided to identify a geographic area. I think it's important to demonstrate because one can become overwhelmed if you look at the total problem. Val>> Very overwhelmed. John Mack>> So rather than having people wringing their hands and saying, you know, the problem is so big, so overwhelming, that we can't do anything about it, that we want to identify an area. We're thinking, on a preliminary basis, somewhere in the Crenshaw community. When I mentioned that, some people think, aha, the Crenshaw community is not all about affluent African-Americans. Yes, there is View Park, but on the other hand, you have The Jungle, all of the social problems and ills there, disproportionate employment, problems of gangs and the tensions with police and then the economic challenges. We'll see if we can demonstrate and, hey, if we can do it here, we can then expand and stretch out. That way, hopefully we can really gain some traction here. Val>> So what have you seen as the biggest change over your thirty-seven years of service? John Mack>> You know, I'm not sure Dr. King, even in his dream, envisioned that you would have a Ken Chenault running American Express or Dick Parsons running Time Warner-AOL or Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch, so -- Val>> -- a lot more elected officials. John Mack>> Right, and we have over nine thousand elected officials nationally, African-Americans at all levels. So those clearly have been some areas. Then getting even close to home, back to the community. I mean, I look at some of the incredible things that have happened frankly since the 1992 civil unrest. We're very proud of the partnership between Toyota and the Urban League, the automotive training center where we have literally trained and placed over fourteen hundred people who were unemployed in automotive repair jobs. Some have been promoted. I mean, to supervisory positions. Magic Johnson and some of the incredible things that he has done. He started with the Magic Johnson Theater and, of course, now he's become quite the entrepreneur all over the place. So you know, all of the news is not bad. We have a foundation to build upon. But I think it's also important that, from an overall perspective, KCET viewers who don't live in South Los Angeles Crenshaw have to understand there's a connection or a relationship that we're really all in this together. If we want to have a healthy, economically viable city, one in which we really come together as a city, and we're truly excited about our new mayor. He's very dynamic and really, really generated a lot of enthusiasm. You need to have hope if you're going to tackle tough problems and I think that that's another important thing. When I think of Antonio Villaraigosa's election, it reminds me of Tom Bradley. I remember shortly after I arrived, Tom Bradley made his second run and he was successful putting together a wonderful coalition with a lot of enthusiasm and progress. I'm sensing that kind of excitement again with our new mayor. You know, you have to have people who believe and who care and know that it's not a quick fix and indeed understand that we have to be marathon runners. Val>> Well, John Mack, thank you for instilling some hope in Los Angeles and we look forward to your continued service in many ways. John Mack>> Thank you, thank you, Val. Val>> If you'd like to see the full findings of the State of Black Los Angeles, you can go to the website for the United Way at unitedwayla.org. To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is a remake of the Roald Dahl children's classic, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" directed by Tim Burton and stars Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly and Variety, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Henry, start us off on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think this is a really intriguing adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel. It has very little to do with the earlier version with Gene Wilder, almost nothing. Obviously, it has to do with Willy Wonka played by Johnny Depp and his huge candy factory. It looks like a blacking factory or something like that out of Dickensian times. He's put out five candy bars with gold tickets that will land five lucky children a tour of his candy factory. Among the children turns out to be Charlie Bucket played by Freddie Highmore, a poor kid who lives in a kind of unimaginable poverty that only director Tim Burton could come up with. His house is at a complete slant and, of course, like in the book, his poor grandparents stay in bed all the time. One of his grandparents is played by David Kelly, the Irish actor. What's interesting about the film is the character of Willy Wonka as developed by Burton and by Johnny Depp in a very good performance. He's a guy who likes making candy, but he doesn't particularly like children. So Depp and Willy both have to negotiate this kind of strange contradiction of a guy who's always at the service of children, but who likes the service more than he likes the kids. Larry Mantle>> Scott, what did you think of the film? Scott Foundas>> Well, let me see how many different ways I disagree with Henry on this movie. Number one, Johnny Depp didn't do it for me at all. I found the performance more eccentric than anything else, like he was trying too hard to be Johnny Depp and dazzle us with this completely original character which, as many people have pointed out, bears a sort of strange resemblance in voice and appearance to Michael Jackson, which I thought kind of took me out of the movie a little bit. Number two, I don't find that the movie is all that different from the Gene Wilder version. It's more elaborately designed. It's better directed by far, but it lacked the tone that the original film had which was a sort of combination of whimsy and menace, which I think is very true Roald Dahl even though he very much disowned the original done version. Very much the action of the film is the same, but I never found that Johnny Depp's performance was as enchanting or magical for me as Gene Wilder's was in the original. Larry Mantle>> Next up is the wild comedy, "Wedding Crashers", starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Well, Scott, were your sides splitting from "Wedding Crashers"? Scott Foundas>> In a few scenes, but I have to say that overall I was disappointed with this movie because it does sort of present itself as a ribald, R-rated farce in "There's Something About Mary" vein. Again, it does occasionally hit the mark. There are a couple of things that I can't even describe on public television what happens in them that are pretty outrageously funny. But at the end of the day, the movie is actually pretty genteel. It kind of shifts gears and it becomes a fairly straightforward romantic comedy and there's a lot of fat on the movie. It runs, I think, a full two hours or maybe a little over, and it just doesn't have the kind of zippy, you know, anarchic pacing that something like this needs. I think Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn who play the title characters are apparently divorce mediators who spend their summers crashing weddings to meet girls. They work well together, but at the end of the day, it's kind of flat. Larry Mantle>> Henry? Henry Sheehan>> Well, at one point early in the movie, Owen Wilson's character says, "I wouldn't say what we do is sleazy because that's the wrong word." Of course, it's exactly the right word. When they're at their sleaziest, this movie is at their funniest. I mean, these guys will do anything to pick up women at a wedding whether that means catering to children by making animals out of balloons or talking about their Purple Hearts or whatever it is. They weren't in the service obviously. That part of the movie is fairly funny. Wilson and Vaughn rely on their generally accepted personas and it works. But then the movie shifts into a more romantic tale and then it just turns into a lot of vanilla goo. There's no energy to it. It falls back on enormous clichés and Wilson and Vaughn don't really have much to do. Vaughn especially is kind of left out from the periphery and brought back in every once in a while to do his shtick, but mostly it becomes the kind of romantic comedy with Wilson and he's not the kind of actor for that kind of movie. Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, a new film from writer-director, Don Roos, "Happy Endings". [Film Clip] Larry Mantle>> Henry, what's your thought on "Happy Endings"? Henry Sheehan>> Well, I was disappointed by the movie because it's by Don Roos who wrote and directed "The Opposite of Sex", which I thought was a very witty, caustic film. I missed his second movie luckily because everyone seems to have hated it. This one, I think, is more in the tradition of that second film. There are three stories to this film, although I would say insofar as the movie has an essential character played by Maggie Gyllenhaal just because she gives the most arresting performance. She's a gold-digger in Los Angeles who's looking for a place to live and seduces this in-the-closet rich gay kid to go live in his house and then, when she's done with him, seduces the father, Tom Arnold. She's so amoral that she's fascinating and it's a great characterization. But the two other plots which are really complicated and feature Lisa Kudrow as a woman who had a child when she was a teenager and is approached by a filmmaker who wants to film their reunion, and her brother who is played by the great British comic actor, Steve Coogan, and is involved in a whole other thing. Like I say, you know, you want to say whole other thing because that's all it really amounts to. It's not much of a picture. There's a lot of plot, but there's not much comedy. Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Scott? Scott Foundas>> I strongly disliked the film. Like another movie this year that I strongly disliked, "Crash". It's sort of festooned with too many characters and too many story lines, all of which feel incredibly phony. Maggie Gyllenhaal is really the only character in the film that sort of pops out and seems like a real human being and, to some extent, Tom Arnold. But all the other story lines are ridiculously convoluted. I mean, it's not just that Lisa Kudrow is looking for her long-lost child, but that she has to hire a documentary filmmaker to make a documentary to help find the child. Every story line has all of these ridiculous complications and it actually, at the end of the day, feels like a betrayal of Lisa Kudrow on some level who was so brilliant in "The Opposite of Sex" and really gets tossed aside here. Larry Mantle>> We thank you for joining us for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com, and Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly and Variety. We invite you to join us again next week at the same time for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. Val>> And remember you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. on 89.3 KPCC. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. This Life and Times health care special is made possible by a grant from QueensCare, a public charity providing health care to the low-income and uninsured residents of Los Angeles County. By the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val>> Next time on Life and Times -- Two-thirds of African-Americans who take the Bar exam fail, but this man is out to change the odds. What's his secret? >> He made it clear that he had the expectation that nothing, even children, family, parents, nothing, was more important for the next two months than studying for the Bar exam. Val>> That's next time on Life and Times. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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