LOS ANGELES – While the non-profit AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s administration, led by founder and president Michael Weinstein, continues to attack the adult film industry about its resistance to condoms on porn sets, the organization’s doctors, physician assistants and nurse practitioners staged a protest Sept. 27 over poor working conditions and understaffing they say put patients at risk.
“Our very real concern is patient care,” Dr. Kim Sommers, medical director at AHF’s Hollywood Healthcare Center, told the Los Angeles Daily News. “Advocacy is an important component [of what the foundation does], but we feel AHF has lost sight of its mission.”
During the year Sommers has worked at the foundation’s Hollywood clinic, she has become increasingly concerned about the lack of medical background possessed by AHF’s administrators. Coupled with AHF’s growing involvement in politics at the local and state levels — which has included reportedly large expenditures of foundation funds to lobby both lawmakers and voters — AHF employees feel “hamstrung.” AHF’s medical professionals are tasked with assembly-line processing of as many 21 patients per doctor per day, without the benefit of sufficient access to Spanish-speaking translators and support personnel or resources. The situation renders adequate patient care impossible, Somers told the Daily News.
A recent audit during which Los Angeles County discovered AHF overbilled the Department of Public Health by $1.7 million in fiscal year 2008-09 may crimp resources even further, if the county demands AHF repay the funds.
On July 31, about two dozen AHF employees voted to unionize as part of a solution to the problem.
“Unionizing is a last resort,” Sommers told the newspaper. “We know our patients. We love them. We just want to care for them better.”
Adult entertainment industry trade association Free Speech Coalition would like to see AHF pay more attention to patient care and less to what Executive Director Diane Duke called a “self-aggrandizing publicity tour.”
“Michael Weinstein has been crusading against the adult film industry while the patients under his care and the medical personnel working for him have suffered the brunt of his neglect as he seeks more publicity for himself,” Duke said. “If Mr. Weinstein paid as much attention to caring for the doctors and nurses working for him and the patients under his supervision as he does every radio and TV appearance, the plight of AIDS patients in Los Angeles County might be much improved.”
The FSC has long maintained that Weinstein’s apparent crusade against the adult film industry has cost AIDS patients — especially those who are part of poor, minority communities that have been devastated by the illness — a high price by decreasing the AHF’s ability to provide quality care and services.
“Weinstein is more concerned about headlines than providing real care,” Duke said. “Like any large healthcare provider, making money and driving fundraising are very real issues for him, which is why he has used a bogus health issue in condoms in filming to drive his media efforts. It is clear there is no media interview Weinstein will turn down, but there are apparently plenty of patients that will have to wait longer for care at AHF facilities.”
[SIZE=1]Image: AHF founder and president Michael Weinstein (left) and Calif. Assembly member Isadore Hall III [D-Compton] host a press conference to introduce AB 332, a proposed state law mandating condom usage on adult film sets. Despite relentless stumping by both men, the bill died in committee.[/SIZE]
