Tenet Tangles With Locals on Cutback Plans

After operating Marina in the black for just one quarter, Inouye said, Tenet had a losing hospital on its hands.

"The loss suddenly increased from $3 million to $13 million," she said. "And this was Tenet. This was a multibillion-dollar company that knew how to make money."

Heart Failure

By the time local activists won their fight in early 2003, securing Tenet's promise to keep Marina open "indefinitely," the hospital looked to some eyes like a clear victim of neglect.

Over the course of nearly two years, state records show, Tenet invested just $50,000 in the Marina hospital. It went entire quarters without spending a dime on hospital upgrades. In contrast, the cash-strapped nuns who ran Marina previously allotted $400,000 for improvements during the hospital's final year under Catholic ownership.

"Tenet bought the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital intending to sell it for land value," Inouye explained simply. "They never put their name up anywhere on the hospital -- only a banner for a short time."

Tenet finally shelled out some real money to repair Marina's damaged roof late last year. But the company had already pulled a knife on Marina's sister hospital in nearby Inglewood. It was slashing the popular cardiac program at Daniel Freeman Memorial and sending the lucrative business to another Tenet-owned hospital just a few blocks away.

It pulled the plug on Memorial's thriving congestive heart failure clinic altogether.

"It was very successful at keeping people out of the hospital," one physician said of the clinic. "And preventive medicine is not what Tenet's in the game for."