Regents Say Medical Center to Stay Open : Hospital: Regents hail $3 million from O.C. supervisors for indigent care at UCI facility, but cutbacks and full closure remain options without more assistance.

Pleased that Orange County supervisors allocated emergency funds to aid financially troubled UCI Medical Center, University of California regents said Thursday that they will not close down the hospital now, but they cautioned that closure would remain an option if long-term plans to help are not successful.

“I had several calls from people in the last few days asking me if this would be the meeting in which we would decide to close the hospital down,” said Frank Clark, an attorney who is chairman of the Board of Regents’ hospital governance committee.

“No such motion to close it is on the table,” he said, “and no such motion will be made in the immediate future. We will try to work this out to the very best of our ability.”

However, Clark added: “There are many problems involved in closing down a hospital, and we are working to identify those, not because we plan to, but we must identify, from a legal standpoint, just where we are.”

Clark’s remarks came after the regents, meeting at UCLA, heard a report from UC Irvine Chancellor Jack W. Peltason about the state of the medical center, which is in Orange.

Though owned and operated by the UC system, the center has served as a county hospital, taking in 60% of the county’s indigent patients last year. It faces severe financial problems that escalated in the fall, when the state announced that it would slash by more than half the amount of money it reimburses hospitals to take in poor and uninsured patients.

In Orange County, the slash means that the 29 hospitals providing indigent medical care are reimbursed only about 10 or 11 cents on the dollar, instead of the 20 to 22 cents of last year.

The Board of Supervisors said the county cannot afford to make up the difference--that is, until Peltason made a personal plea to the supervisors that the medical center could not survive without more help. Last week, the supervisors allocated a onetime, $3-million aid package, but even county officials acknowledged that it was little more than a Band-Aid measure.

Peltason told the regents Thursday that while the $3 million is not enough and will not solve problems for the next fiscal year, the money represents a new attitude in the county about whose responsibility it is to care for the poor.

“I want to emphasize that the supervisors . . . full well understand that we have not answered the problem,” Peltason said. “We are just beginning. We are back at the negotiating table already to talk about 1991 funds.

“But we have a commitment from the leadership, who are now aware that the University of California cannot and will not continue to subsidize indigent medical care.”

Rumblings about closing the center have circulated among the regents since they heard reports from staff members in January that the hospital continues to operate in the red.

Faced with the tightest UC budget in 20 years, several regents said they might have no choice but to shut down the medical center.

Last year, UCI Medical Center took care of 10,000 indigent patients, leading to a $10.9-million deficit for 1990.

The center, one of five teaching hospitals in the UC system, handles both Medi-Cal patients and those who qualify for state-funded Indigent Medical Services. Unreimbursed costs at the hospital have risen to $29.3 million per year.

At the same time that they allocated the $3 million, the supervisors promised a more strenuous effort to distribute the burden of indigent care among all of the county’s private hospitals.

Even so, UC officials said they will continue exploring other options to avoid bearing most of the burden of county indigent care. The choices range from closing the UCI emergency room to shutting down other departments in the hospital to total closure.

Any of those options, UC officials said, would leave a significant gap in health care in Orange County.

“I just hope that the people in Orange County appreciate the services you are providing to the county,” Clark told Peltason, “and that they understand how hard it is to maintain the hospital, to keep its doors open.”