UCI Agrees to Share Indigent-Care Funds : Health: Proposed pact would give part of $3 million to two other hospitals and start a medical referral system for 24,000 needy patients.

Three months after county supervisors gave UC Irvine $3 million to keep its near-bankrupt hospital from closing, university leaders have agreed to share the money with two other hospitals and to start a new program to provide medical care for the poor.

The proposed agreement is expected to be approved by supervisors on Tuesday.

So far its only critic is Chauncey Alexander, chairman of the United Way Health Care Task Force who argues that the hospital needs every penny of the $3 million--and should have kept it all.

“As it is now, they’re settling for less than they should,” Alexander said. Hospital officials say their deficit may reach $10 million when the fiscal year ends June 30.

UCI officials said the agreement accomplishes their goal, which is to aid Orange County’s faltering indigent-care network, not the UCI Medical Center alone.

“This essentially is an agreement that we have been wanting to have,” said Ruth Ann Baker, UCI’s assistant chancellor for legislative relations. “Our first priority is in fixing the problem rather than continuing to throw money at it.”

Rather than spend $3 million solely on UCI Medical Center in Orange, the proposed agreement would give $1.88 million to that hospital, $200,000 to Western Medical Center-Santa Ana and $180,000 to Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center. The three hospitals are the county’s largest providers of indigent care.

In addition, in a move that local officials called unprecedented, $740,000 would be used to start a referral system for the county’s 24,000 indigent patients.

Under the still-developing plan, indigent patients who now flood hospital emergency rooms for problems such as flu or hypertension would be referred to physicians and clinics for primary care.

Gaddi H. Vasquez, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, called plans for such a referral system “a positive part of developing health-care solutions.”

And county Health Care Agency Director Tom Uram noted that doctors, county officials and leaders from the Hospital Council of Southern California are now working together to build a referral system that would offer “preventive medicine and that makes the system whole.” He said he expected that a consultant could be hired to develop the system and start it in about a year.

Supervisors in March agreed to direct $3 million to the university medical center after UC Regents threatened to close the hospital if the county did not pick up more of the tab for indigent care.

Last year, the medical center treated 10,000 of the county’s 24,000 indigent patients. Twenty-eight other hospitals handle the rest. The county reimburses them at a greatly discounted rate--and their tab for uncompensated care of Orange County’s indigent patients reaches $60 million a year, said David Langness, Hospital Council vice president.