UCI Officials Fear a Crunch of Indigent AIDS Patients When Epidemic Widens

UC Irvine and its medical center are engaged in the battle against acquired immune deficiency syndrome, but the university doesn’t want its hospital to become overloaded with AIDS patients that private hospitals may try to shun, two UCI officials said Wednesday.

“The AIDS problem is bigger than UCI,” said Chancellor Jack W. Peltason. “It’s a problem that’s going to take the entire county and the state working together.”

Peltason and newly appointed College of Medicine Dean Edward Quilligan said UCI Medical Center has no overload of AIDS patients. But they said that in years ahead, when a sizable increase in the number of patients is forecast, hospitals may be facing problems in caring for terminal AIDS patients, especially those having no health insurance.

Because AIDS patients usually die of prolonged illnesses, such as pneumonia, their hospital care is often long term and very expensive. “Someone, or some agency, must pay for the treatment of these patients,” Peltason said.

Peltason and Quilligan discussed AIDS during a joint press conference Wednesday morning in Peltason’s office. Peltason called the press gathering to introduce Quilligan, who assumed his post last Friday.

In 1985, UCI Medical Center suffered a $9.6-million deficit, chiefly because it accepted for treatment large numbers of indigent patients. The Legislature that year voted special money to bail out the medical center.

During the 1985 budget dilemma, some doctors at UCI Medical Center said in off-the-record interviews that several private hospitals in Orange County “dump patients” who can’t pay. Many of those patients are told to go to UCI Medical Center “for free treatment,” the doctors said. As a result, said these doctors, UCI Medical Center became overextended in caring for indigents.

Last year, the hospital began to come out of the red ink, largely because it was more successful in attracting a higher percentage of insured patients, according to medical center director Leon Schwartz.

Larry Stahl, assistant director of UCI Medical Center, said in an interview Wednesday that so far, he has seen no sign of other hospitals in the county deliberately rejecting, or “dumping,” AIDS patients and urging them to go to UCI Medical Center. But Stahl said he and other UCI officials are concerned that the hospital not become viewed “as the only hospital treating AIDS. . . . We already are treating about 40% of the (hospitalized) AIDS patients in Orange County.”

Stahl added, “We currently are averaging about seven to nine AIDS patients in our daily hospital census. We can take care of that many, but we feel that the number should not go above that average. The reason is that we are an acute-care hospital for many types of things, and if we become overextended in care of AIDS patients, our other types of care suffer.”

Stahl said he thinks an AIDS task force named by the Orange County Board of Supervisors will be successful in directing the flow of AIDS patients so that no one hospital is overloaded. “As the number of patients goes up in future years, all the other acute-care hospitals in the county are going to have to do their share.”