It’s been a year since the Motion Picture and Television Fund announced it was closing its in-patient hospital and Long Term Care Unit, setting off a war of attrition that has prevented the fund from closing as quickly as it otherwise might.
In a place where even the Christmas tree managed to cause hard feelings, the new year shows no sign of compromise.
Since the announcement on Jan. 14, 2009, the LTCU has shrunk from 136 members to 63 – partly from deaths, but also the result of 32 transfers to outside nursing homes and 12 to other units at the Wasserman campus, a 44-acre parcel of the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.
Eight LTCU residents were deemed fit enough to move into the Home’s independent- and assisted-living quarters. The workload thus lessened, 53 unionized hospital staff members have been laid off, with 240 scheduled to eventually be terminated.
The healthier residents living in independent- and assisted-living arrangements remain unaffected -- although in the future they would no longer have the option of moving into the LTCU, should they require what is legally designated as “skilled nursing” care. Anti-closure activists allege that this prospect has intimidated these elderly patients from disclosing illnesses or pains to nurses or doctors, lest they be moved into an outside facility.
None of this has gone over particularly well.
On one side of the debate is the fund, which cites mounting financial challenges for closing the two-story residential facility connected to the hospital. The fund’s motto is Taking Care of Our Own.
On the other are Long Term Care residents and family members who began fighting back immediately after the fund’s January 14, 2009 closure announcement. They either signed on as litigants with personal-injury giant Girardi | Keese, or formed an activist group that goes by Saving the Lives of Our Own. Or both.
The MPTF says the decision to close is irrevocable, while declaring the hospital and residential unit will stay open until the last resident is relocated to an outside nursing home. The proponents for keeping the units operating tell The Wrap they want them kept open and running at their former capacity for all time – it’s not enough, they say, to have the facilities stay open only for the current population and then close once the last resident passes away.
The dug-in stances are reminiscent of a long labor strike, with nearly every event at the campus scrutinized and challenged by both sides. Most recently, the hospital did not place a Christmas tree in its lobby for the first time in memory. Activists ascribed its absence to the fund’s Scrooge-like miserliness and what they say is an ongoing intimidation campaign. The MPTF, though, says this year the tree, along with a Hanukah menorah, was merely moved to a first-floor dining/activities room, where more people were likely to see it.
Actor Bill Smitrovich (pictured), who is national chair of the Screen Actors Guild’s Senior Performers Committee, and not an MPTF resident, believes both sides' lack of compromise is the result of the closure issue being taken over by lawyers.
