So I remained skeptical, even as we kept meeting over a period of months. Plenty of intriguing leads, but none of them provided evidence of any UCLA wrongdoing. He had collected articles about lawsuits charging abuses and favoritism in the UC system over the years and compiled impressive amounts of data on our dysfunctional American healthcare system. The doctor had delved into state public records, noting the suspiciously outsized salaries of certain UCLA executives and medical center doctors involved in fundraising. “We have one healthcare system for the 1 percent and another for everyone else,” the doctor noted. He described the UCLA list as “a workaround for the very people with the money and power to change the system.” “You never know,” he said, lowering his voice before pulling documents from a fat file and making his case against the American system of healthcare generally and UCLA specifically. A grey-haired, sixty-ish ringer for Spielberg, the doctor scanned the room, making sure we weren’t somehow being watched. At dawn over lox and bagels at a local deli, we took a corner booth. Mostly as a favor, but also out of curiosity, I agreed to meet with the doctor. If only he could get a reporter interested, the doctor said to my friend, he was sure this privileged treatment would become a big story. For several years he’d amassed information documenting what he saw as a fundamentally unfair and possibly illegal system of favoritism for high-net-worth patients at the UCLA Medical Center, a California state-chartered institution. In fact, the inequity of the situation had become this particular doctor’s obsession. His wealthier patients received life-giving treatment in quick order while others less fortunate had to wait their turn. That unfairness bugged my friend’s doctor, too. Now his life might be saved because he was rich enough to be “on the list” - and the basic unfairness bugged him. He had directed a considerable portion of his financial resources to philanthropy, underwriting social welfare organizations around the world. But my friend also possessed a fierce sense of right and wrong. What list? Born in modest circumstances, my friend’s business success over a lifetime of entrepreneurship allowed him a first-class lifestyle. My friend found himself ushered ahead of roomfuls of waiting patients because, he was told by the hospital staff, “you’re on the list.” In the meantime, the red carpet treatment at UCLA continued. My wealthy friend, his savvy doctor explained, was about to be solicited for a large donation. Not a UCLA alum, my friend wondered what was up. Then a hint of a quid pro quo soon emerged: an invitation out of the blue for my friend and his wife to lunch with UCLA’s dean. But a call from my friend’s savvy doctor got his patient admitted quickly to UCLA’s world-renowned, top-ranked Ronald Reagan Hospital.Īppointment with the specialist scheduled, treatments began, and things went well, with the kind of first-class care and extraordinary attention you’d expect more from a private clinic than a nonprofit, taxpayer-supported teaching hospital like UCLA. My friend figured he’d probably never get the chance to take that treatment.įor anyone else, a mortal countdown would have commenced. But only a single busy specialist, impossible to see, offered that experimental treatment at the UCLA Medical Center, a public institution with an impossibly long waiting list. His oncologist had prescribed a risky treatment that, my friend understood, might kill him. My friend, a man in his mid-sixties, was dying from a terminal form of cancer. My Capital & Main piece began with a deathbed promise to a friend, not the usual way I start assignments.
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