Thomas L. Garthwaite may have just taken on the toughest job in California, even if it pays — at $275,000 per year — the highest public government salary in Los Angeles County. Garthwaite is the new chief of the county‘s Department of Health Services (DHS), with its six public hospitals and nearly 150 clinics. And he’s its third head in 17 generally difficult years. He proposes to do what his DHS-director predecessors Robert Gates and Mark Finucane were not able to do. Which is to make the $4.3-billion-a-year department (whose budget is far larger than that of the city of Los Angeles) provide fair and complete health services to a swelling and largely indigent patient population of around 2.8 million without threatening to bankrupt the county. He must do this in the face of what the county supervisors anticipate to be a $900 million total federal-funding shortfall over the next two years. More than $300 million of this will fall on the DHS. Garthwaite, in his first public appearance before the Board of Supervisors, recently was asked to make $100 million of such cuts over the coming fiscal year.
Source: Vital Signs | L.A. Weekly