ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Attack on Physicians: ‘Killing Messenger’ : Medicine: With 10-hour delays reported by those seeking care at L.A. hospital, it’s a marvel more don’t rampage.

The bloody attack on physicians in the emergency room at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center is the most recent case of social revenge by “killing the messenger.” TV images of the triage area at that hospital show in stark reality what the urban poor are forced to endure to obtain health care.

Pictures of a cavernous waiting room with hundreds of people in rows and rows of chairs patiently waiting to be acknowledged are appalling.

Most of us who consider ourselves middle class have a low tolerance to delays of any kind. I won’t stand in movie lines. If I call for reservations at an airline or a hotel and am put on hold, a minute seems like an hour and if they keep me for more than three or four minutes I am very apt to hang up.

The patients at L.A. County’s walk-in clinic are not the idle rich queuing up for a theater or a restaurant. Some are illegal immigrants. Many are homeless and some are among the millions and growing numbers of the employed whose jobs do not provide health insurance. Collectively, they are all sick, frightened people waiting for relief.

How much sitting in wait should you have to endure if your head aches and you have a fever of 102 or if your chest hurts and you think you are having a heart attack? Imagine their feelings of frustration and despair. With some patients reporting delays of up to an inhuman eight or 10 hours, it is no wonder that some of the emotionally unstable crack. The marvel is that more don’t rampage.

And yet when their righteous anger turns to wrath, the victims are not the remote legislators whose self-centered political parsimony has forced this debacle, but the most visible and vulnerable and innocent targets of opportunity, physicians and nurses.

Do not suppose for a minute that the problem is unique to Los Angeles.

For two decades, the medical leaders of the Orange County Medical Assn. have been vainly pleading with the Orange County Board of Supervisors to accept some fiscal responsibility for the care of the medically indigent. The underserved are a helpless constituency. They can’t or don’t vote and they can’t contribute to campaigns. Politically, they are very easy to ignore.

Thankfully, there has as yet been nothing locally like the carnage in the clinic at L.A. County-USC. But we in Orange County have been forced to abandon most of our trauma care units, and one by one our emergency rooms and even some of our major hospitals are closing.

It is cruel to dangle steak and apple pie in the faces of people too poor to buy bread. It is cynical to display the miracles of modern medicine, new diagnostic instruments, new surgical techniques and medicines, on that ubiquitous medium called television and then say to the people, ‘Here it is, but you can’t have it because it costs too much.’ In banana republics and now in the Balkans, revolutions have been spawned for less.

Despite President Clinton’s call for Draconian cuts in health care costs, it will be a pity to have to report to the American people that as a nation we have become too poor to buy for all our citizens what our science has produced.

That would be a tragedy as painful as the insane violence committed against the three physicians who were trying to interpose themselves between the indigent sick and a callous bureaucracy.