LAST WEEK NOT ONLY DID THE COUNTY of Los Angeles resolve to close 11 public and four school clinics belonging to its Department of Health Services, reduce beds in one hospital and cut immunizations for more than 80,000 children. It also decided, on grounds that it was improving the urban health environment, to spend DHS money to kill off a long-established seaside colony of stray cats.Now that’s a cheap juxtaposition, isn’t it? But this is the kind of idiotic priority setting that has, on many levels, landed our county health services into the mess they are in now. And it’s going on, even as our county supervisors are caving in their chests with mighty blows as they wail: This is it, we have no choice but to cut 4,230 jobs by 2006, pile services onto a handful of private clinics and our few remaining public ones. Yet there are enough dollars from someplace, somewhere, to put up as much as a reported $250 per cat for possible extermination of a colony of around 100 felines on a beach near San Pedro.
Source: Cruel Priorities | L.A. Weekly