A SOCIAL EMERGENCY

TEODORA MARIN, 21, ARRIVED LAST week at the sprawling County-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles in no mood to ponder the fine points of municipal finance. Earlier in the day, she had discovered several soft lumps on the neck of her son Jesus. Jesus had been born at County-USC, premature and sickly; the doctors had told Teodora, a recent Mexican immigrant, that she must bring him back if unusual symptoms developed. Back to County-USC, that is: without money or insurance, none of the area's private clinics will see her. As a nurse inspected her son's swollen lymph nodes and scheduled a blood test, Teodora allowed that she knew enough of Los Angeles County's latest disaster--the fiscal one--to dread its consequences. "If the hospital weren't here," she said, "I don't know what I'd do. I don't know where I'd go."

Her apprehension is justified. County-USC, one of the busiest hospitals in the U.S., may fall victim to emergency budget cutting that has its root causes in California in the 1970s but foreshadows grim national choices in the '90s. The dire prognosis for County-USC was delivered on Monday by L.A. County chief administrative officer Sally Reed. Saying that she wanted to "put reality on table," Reed announced that the county risked insolvency unless it could make up a $1.2 billion budget shortfall within a year. She suggested a raft of drastic measures: a 20% cut in services, the elimination of 18,255 jobs and the closing of 30 parks and 15 libraries. But the biggest savings would come from shutting down the 9,000-employee County-USC Center, with its annual $803 million budget.

Within a day, 1,500 protesters gathered on the center's steps, chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Sally Reed has got to go.'' The huge hospital complex, which serves 60,000 overnight clients and 855,000 outpatients a year, is an island of security in violence-riven East L.A. If it were to close, smaller, private facilities might fail to replicate the quality of its burn center and trauma ward; or, most important, its commitment to the uninsured poor, who make up 40% of its customers. Already furious at California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187, local leaders see Reed's plan as a pursuit of the same policy by different means. Said Chicano activist Agustin Cebada: "This is genocide against our community."

And yet Reed, and a growing number of politicians who support her, held their ground last week. For three years, the county's revenues have lagged hundreds of millions of dollars behind its budgets, with the deficits covered through big-time borrowing. This year the lenders, spooked by the spectacular bankruptcy of nearby Orange County, seem ready to rebel. Within days of Reed's announcement, three major investment services warned potential buyers of L.A. County's bond issues that its credit rating was being reviewed or downgraded, an adjustment that could signal the start of a tailspin. Zev Yaroslavsky, a fiscally hard-nosed Democrat who is the swing vote on the five-person County Board of Supervisors, which must rule on Reed's proposal, says, "The Latino community may feel these cuts are racial, but it's not racial, it's economic. It's about whether the entire county shuts down next year."