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Despite having UCLA in its name, we know that UCLA Health has always operated like a private for-profit healthcare system and evaded any public accountability to the broader Los Angeles community. This latest decision to abandon (the already shamefully too few) Medi-Cal patients receiving primary and speciality care at UCLA Health is just another example of their greed and medical apartheid as usual – as a medical student at UCLA, I am outraged and ashamed to be training under these so-called ‘leaders.’

— UCLA Medical Student

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The harm that is being caused by this decision is heart breaking. It not only hurts our community and patients but in a profession with high rates of “burn out”, being forced to no longer care for some of our patients causes deep moral distress in the employees of UCLA. In UCLA Health’s mission statement it reads “…to alleviate suffering, and deliver acts of kindness”. This action is directly against their mission statement. It causes suffering and is beyond unkind.

— UCLA Physician

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I saw a patient in the last month who lost their commercial insurance through their parents due to an unexpected job closure. This patient has a severe, life-threatening disease that requires biologic medications and close subspecialty follow up. They have Medi-Cal now, but their Medi-Cal insurance is not accepted by UCLA. The patient’s parents paid $600 out of pocket because they were very concerned about their child, who has not had access to critical medications for several months. Our team urgently submitted an application for California Children’s Services (a supplemental insurance for Medi-Cal patients with specific chronic illnesses that covers subspecialty follow up), but so far their CCS insurance has not been approved. They were also followed by a pediatrician for primary care at UCLA, but UCLA will not allow them to follow up with their primary care because UCLA is not contracted with their current type of Medi-Cal. I worry for this patient’s safety, because if their disease is uncontrolled, they are at risk for severe systemic inflammation and organ damage, potential organ failure, and death.

I have also witnessed decreasing patient loads already in our subspecialty, and this is dangerous for our pediatric patients who don’t have other options except the very few other children’s hospitals such as CHLA, which are already overwhelmed with subspecialty patients. I am also devastated as a trainee and worry that my cofellows and I will not see as many diverse and complex patients in clinic and for in-hospital consults as we should. This would weaken our training and would decrease recruitment of bright minds and strong trainees.

— UCLA Pediatric Subspecialty Fellow

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This summer I had the honor of caring for a patient with interstitial lung disease who presented with a pneumothorax. They had been hospitalized a few months prior and wanted to be seen by the lung transplant team, but did not have this service covered at the time. Since then, the patient and a family member worked diligently to switch to an HCLA plan that UCLA accepts. Unfortunately, by the time they re-presented to UCLA, UCLA Health’s contract with HCLA was ending. Despite having a chest tube, end-stage ILD, and a recent insurance change — they were no longer covered for advanced lung disease (lung transplant) services.

They remained in the hospital for over two months with a tube in their chest, eventually getting a second chest tube for a worsening pneumothorax, and were upgraded to the ICU for respiratory failure. After months of assessing alternative options and being declined by other hospital systems, they were eventually approved for advanced lung disease evaluation. By that time, they had deconditioned so poorly after two chest tubes, a blood patch, hospital-acquired infections, and an ICU stay that they were no longer deemed a candidate for lung transplant.

— UCLA Medical Student