Indigent-Care Accord Reached for UCI Center

UCI Medical Center will continue to treat large numbers of the county’s poor for at least another year under a tentative contract reached this week between the Hospital Council of Southern California and the Orange County Health Care Agency.

Once the year is over, however, a medical center official said, the center’s officials will have to decide whether they can continue the with enormous financial losses associated with treating the indigent.

“This is just a holding action,” said William Drozda, the Orange medical center’s senior associate director, referring to the proposed agreement. “When we get through this year, we’ve got a decision to make.”

Thomas E. Uram, director of the Health Care Agency, confirmed that tentative agreement had been reached but would provide no details.

Drozda and other medical center officials said they expect the center’s budget to have a $5-million deficit this fiscal year and an $11-million deficit next year. They attribute those losses to county and state failures since 1983 to reimburse hospitals for the full cost of caring for the poor.

The teaching hospital largely pays its own expenses and cares for 35% of the county’s poor. It is reimbursed by the state and the county for only about 70% of the cost of that care, medical center officials said.

Drozda said Thursday that the tentative contract does nothing to alleviate the financial losses from indigent care.

In the first year of the three-year proposal, the medical center will receive a $8.4-million grant from the Hospital Council to treat uninsured patients, mostly illegal aliens. In the remaining two years, however, that grant will be divided proportionately by the council among 33 hospitals in the county, including UCI Medical Center.

In the past, the medical center alone had received the special grant through a direct contract with the county. The medical center had also received part of a $33-million fund that was tapped by all 33 of the hospitals contracting with the county to provide indigent care.

“What the county has done is consolidated all of its medical services for the poor under one program,” Drozda said.

Uram confirmed that agreements have also been reached with the 32 other hospitals. Once the proposals, including the medical center’s agreement, are finalized, they must be approved by the Board of Supervisors and the hospitals, a process that both Uram and Drozda estimated would take about 60 days.

What the medical center does after the first year of the county contract will depend largely on how much it receives from federal programs for immigrants and illegal aliens that are expected to become operational during the next year, Drozda said.