Cancer Patients Protest Switch of 2 Physicians

Caught between traditional notions of doctor-patient relations and the newest wave in medical care management, a dozen cancer patients picketed a Simi Valley health-care group Thursday to protest its decision to cancel the contracts of their cancer specialists.

The patients said Family Health Care’s move is forcing them to either switch to another medical group to keep their specialists, or say goodbye to doctors they know and trust who are familiar with their cases.

“It’s not your normal doctor-patient relationship,” said Dan O’Donnell, 59, of Simi Valley, who is undergoing chemotherapy for liver cancer and battling his insurer to keep his specialist. “Another doctor might not be as astute, might not have as much current information on me. . . . Somehow, somehow I’ll stay with him.”

Lynne Jaseph, 60, of Thousand Oaks paraded in front of Family Health Care with a protest sign and wondered whether she would be able to keep her cancer specialist.

“I think it’s terrible when you’re going through something like this to have to change doctors midstream,” she said.

Her insurance company, Maxicare, has told her that she must change oncologists by April 1, “and they wouldn’t pay for these doctors,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Family Health Care plans to end contracts next month with Drs. Hany R. Khalil and John Thachil because the oncologists refused to buy into a new system of managed health care, said Dr. Geoffrey Graham, president and managing partner of Family Health Care.

The two oncologists agreed to earn a flat annual rate rather than being paid for each procedure or surgery they performed, Graham said. But they balked at paying annual fees to send their patients to UCLA for any care they cannot not provide, he said.

Family Health Care has already transferred more than 200 of Khalil’s and Thachil’s cancer patients into the care of two new cancer specialists, Drs. Harry Menco and Bruce Zietz, Graham said. It was Menco and Zietz who helped connect UCLA’s network of specialists with Family Health Care, a consortium of 40 Simi Valley doctors, Graham said.

The patients are not being forced to give up their doctors, he said: “I feel badly for the pain that they’re in, but it’s not because of us.”

But Khalil said Thursday that he and partner Thachil were forced out in favor of two doctors who would cost less for Family Health Care to employ. Khalil and Thachil have lost nearly half their patients and incurred much higher overhead costs as a result, he said.

“It was money, pure and simple,” Khalil said. “They found somebody to do it a little cheaper.”