Beverly Hills Votes To Allow Elective Surgeries

BEVERLY HILLS, CA —In a 4-1 vote Tuesday, the Beverly Hills City Council approved an amendment to its March 16 urgency ordinance prohibiting all elective medical, dental, and surgical procedures in the city during the COVID-19 pandemic. That meant that vital procedures like heart valve replacements, angioplasty, tumor removals, and colonoscopies were impossible.

The Council voted to follow recently revised State and County guidelines that do not prohibit elective procedures. With coronavirus numbers flattening and the hospital bed situation mostly under control, the City will now defer to medical professionals to determine which medical procedures to carry out. From the March 16 ordinance until Tuesday, the City had some of the strictest regulations in the state.

“Based on what Gov. Newsom came out with on Monday, those colonoscopies and other procedures would not have been permitted because we had a more restrictive ordinance that would not have allowed it,” Beverly Hills Mayor Lester Friedman said. “So all we did was eliminate the more restrictive portion of it so that we are totally in line with the guidelines of the State and the County.

In a Council Study Session Tuesday night, Councilmember Julian Gold told the story of a friend currently in tremendous pain because the shoulder surgery she needs is classified as "elective."

“From my perspective, health comes first always, so I would absolutely support us being in line with the State, but beyond that, I definitely don’t want to be a part of postponing health situations, and the whole reason for the Stay at Home Order is because of health,” said Councilmember Lili Bosse.

Councilmember John Mirisch was the sole dissenter. Mirisch was concerned that “elective procedures” would include nonessential cosmetic procedures that would take up doctors’ time and unnecessarily increase the risk of infections. “I would not want somebody to become sick because they went in and had a boob job or a butt job or something like that,” he said. “I think these need to be medically necessary, and I think in our previous ordinance it allowed the medical professionals the leeway to determine [what is medically necessary.] We have quite a number of surgery centers – if we allow them all to be open, they’re going to be looking for the kind of volume that generates business.”

While the new State and County guidelines that Beverly Hills now adheres to technically permit elective cosmetic procedures. “The boards of each of these [medical] organizations have all stated that purely cosmetic aesthetic procedures should not be performed,” Friedman said. “I think that there are physicians out there that are going to follow that. I think the discussion we had is if there are one or two of those that slip by, wouldn’t that be a better result than not permitting a person to have a necessary elective procedure? They are only permitted to do medically necessary procedures under the State, under the County.”

Friedman estimates it will take some time before elective surgeries are permitted. Though Councilmember Gold, a physician, predicted the changes could be in effect by next week, Friedman noted that there are many steps between now and then. “All of these places have laid off personnel, they have to sanitize the areas, each person that comes in for a procedure is going to have to be remedically cleared by their internist before they can come in, they’re going to probably have a COVID test … maybe within the next couple of weeks.”