His Brother’s Keeper : With the health care system in turmoil, medical student Luis Lovato is looking out for the little guys.

While Washington bickers about Medicare and the Los Angeles County health system struggles to survive, UCLA medical student Luis Lovato is looking out for the little guy.

Barely into his first year of medical school, Lovato wasted no time setting up clinics to provide medical care for the poor. First, he helped organize a community health screening in Southeast Los Angeles. Next stop--Tijuana.

Lovato mobilized students, solicited medication and pressed private organizations for funds. Then, his group rented a van and hit the road. Working out of a tent, the group examined more than 200 people; hundreds more were waiting to be seen, but the small group did not have time to get to them. The next year, Lovato took the free clinic to Olvera Street in Los Angeles, where more than 5,000 people sought care. Since then, he has helped UCLA to establish an annual free clinic in Lennox.

“I remember one guy on Olvera whose glucose level was at an astronomical high,” Lovato said. “He was a diabetic and didn’t even know it. That’s a guy I might have seen in the emergency room, after it was too late.”

Lovato’s relentless commitment to improving medical care for L.A.’s poor was praised by the Assn. of American Medical Colleges, which has named him the nation’s “Top Minority Medical Student” of the year. The award honors community involvement, outstanding academic achievement and a student’s potential contribution to medicine. Lovato, now a fourth-year medical student, plans to work in the field of emergency medicine.

His decision to become an emergency room physician at a public hospital stems from his concern for L.A.’s uninsured population--those emergency rooms are where the poor and frequently uninsured people end up.

“This is front-line medicine,” said Lovato, 25. “As clinics close their doors, more sick people are coming in here because they don’t have insurance. I’m the first physician they’ve ever seen. For them, emergency care is primary care.”

Lovato considered more lucrative medical specialties, but he believes the public hospital emergency room is where he would do his best work.

“He felt that was his calling,” says his girlfriend, Rosaura Lomeli, an elementary school teacher. “But I think even if he hadn’t decided on the emergency room, he would still be giving medical care to people who don’t have the money for it.”

Although the pay is low and the burnout level is high, Lovato says he can easily identify with the patients he would serve.

“How much would I really be serving my community if I specialized in something like cardiology at a private hospital? I would lose a large tie with where I came from. Being a Mexican American is who I am. I’m proud of it. And I want to help people like me who have gotten the short end of the stick.”

Lovato was born in downtown Los Angeles. When he was 5, his parents divorced and he moved to Whittier, where he was raised an only child by his mother, Christine. Electrical engineering preoccupied his high school thoughts at Rosemead’s Don Bosco Technical Institute. But when his mother checked herself into Whittier Presbyterian, Lovato changed his career track to medicine.

“She was having stomach pains and all the tests were negative. They said she needed exploratory surgery and that scared me,” said Lovato, who was 17 at the time. “She’s my only mother and I realized how fragile life is.”

As an undergraduate at UCLA, Lovato worked for the Student Health Advocate program first as a counselor, then as a co-director. Early on, he saw that the needs of minorities interested in medicine were not being satisfied--and reacted. He pulled together a health care career fair and started a medical counseling program. When he had the time, he tutored minority students who were having trouble adjusting to college.

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Lovato possesses the ability to make patients feel like family. His friends tell stories of how his patients call him up or come back to the emergency room to see how he’s doing.

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“Luis has great empathy and that’s important, especially in the emergency room,” said Dr. William Figueroa, assistant dean of the UCLA Medical School. “He also shows promise because he realizes there is a revolution happening where specialists are needed less and generalists, like ER doctors, are needed more.”

“Luis is going to be a great ER doctor because he is so compassionate,” said his roommate, Emilio Luna, who plans to specialize in pediatrics. “He knows how to look at the big picture. Sometimes patients come into emergency with so many symptoms. You need someone like Luis who can find the main problem.”

After practicing in the emergency room, Lovato says, his future lies in academia, where he wants to teach future doctors to show more sensitivity to minority patients. The “Hispanic panic” is how Lovato says some UCLA residents and instructors define an emergency room patient who is experiencing an anxiety attack, has multiple symptoms and only speaks Spanish.

“I find phrases like that offensive,” he says. “And I want to ask, ‘Does the patient have a problem or does the doctor have a communication barrier?’ Someone needs to teach future doctors how to be more sensitive than that.”