Katz Wants Doctors to Fulfill Promises to Poor : Health care: Assemblyman’s bill asks licensing board to force physicians who took government aid to meet commitments they made to practice in low-income areas.

A Sylmar assemblyman Friday took his campaign against “deadbeat doctors”--who accepted government tuition loans and scholarships but ducked the accompanying community service requirements--to a San Fernando Valley agency that says it cannot afford physicians to treat the poor.

“These doctors are stealing from all of us,” said Richard Katz, a Democrat, at a press conference at El Proyecto del Barrio, which has been trying for two years without success to hire two family practitioners.

Katz has introduced legislation calling on the California Medical Board to refuse to relicense doctors who received government loans and scholarships as medical students and then failed to live up to terms requiring them to serve from two to four years in poor and rural areas, or repay the loans. Doctors must be relicensed every two years.

Katz said that according to the federal government, which makes the loans, there are 120 doctors in California who have run out on their obligations, still owing between $30 million and $60 million.

Katz’s legislation deals with doctors who completed their education with the aid of loans through the Health Education Assistance Loan program, or scholarships through the National Health Service Corps.

The scholarship program requires recipients to set up practice in an area defined as underserved for several years, or repay the government at a rate of three times the value of the scholarship. The loan program allowed borrowers to work off the loan by doing community service work.

Katz’s legislation would punish scholarship recipients who did not fulfill their obligations, as well as loan recipients who neither repaid their loans nor did community service work.

Katz said 83% of the doctors who received the scholarships fulfill their obligations but those who don’t exacerbate a longstanding lack of good medical care in poor communities.

“There is a huge need out there,” he said. But some doctors, once they leave medical school, prefer to set up practice in wealthier areas such as Beverly Hills, he said.

“They turn their backs on the taxpayer and the people they’re supposed to serve,” he said.

El Proyecto, a private nonprofit agency with clinics in Arleta and Pacoima, serves 40 patients a day with three doctors--a family practitioner, a pediatrician and an obstetrician. El Proyecto President Corinne Sanchez said she has interviewed prospective doctors to fill two vacant positions, but has found “they want to be paid more than what we can pay them.”

If his bill passed, Katz conceded, it would not necessarily solve El Proyecto’s problem, but it could make available more candidates for Pacoima, which is classed by the federal government as an “underserved” area.

The Katz bill has already passed the Assembly and is scheduled to be heard Monday by the Senate Business and Professions Committee.

However, the California Medical Assn. has announced its opposition to the bill, which will make passage more difficult.

Katz blasted the organization, saying doctors running out on loan obligations are doing something “so outrageous that the CMA will have trouble justifying its position.”

Tim Shannon, a spokesman for the medical association, said the organization is “not opposed to going after deadbeat doctors.”

But he said Katz’s methods are unsuitable and listed three areas of concern. There should be guarantees, he said, that the doctors being accused are actually in default. He said some “deadbeat” doctors contend that they were promised that they would be allowed to do their community service in a certain area, but when they got out of school the government withdrew that promise.

He also said doctors should not be singled out for punishment, noting that there are deadbeat attorneys and others who fail to repay student loans.

But the association’s primary concern, he said, is with the threat of withholding the license. Shannon said that would prevent doctors from earning money to repay the loans and scholarships or “the doctors would just go to another state” beyond the reach of California licensing law.

He recommended their incomes be garnisheed to repay the loans.