A Son Crusades for Mom

He helped his cancer-stricken mom pick out a wig, one so convincing that few knew her hair had fallen out from chemotherapy. Every two weeks, he took it to be cleaned. On her lunch hour, he walked her several blocks from her job as director of a church preschool to her breast cancer treatments at Kaiser Permanente's center in Los Angeles.

Then, on a rainy March day in 1998, he held her hand as Zevart Yedalian heaved her last rattled breath at age 53.

It was the end of her four-year battle with cancer -- and the beginning of Chant's crusade.

Yedalian, now 29, has been waging a legal battle against Kaiser Permanente ever since. He claims that California's largest health maintenance organization wrongly denied his mother a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant. "They killed my mom," he says.

Kaiser lawyers say the HMO did all it could for Mrs. Yedalian.

The outcome of Yedalian's lawsuit could have broad implications for Kaiser and other HMOs, according to some consumer advocates and attorneys who are closely following the case. About 1,000 Kaiser members or their families file malpractice claims each year. Nearly all of them are subject to arbitration, a long process that limits awards and tends to benefit health plans.

To get his case moved out of arbitration, Yedalian argued that his mother's contract with Kaiser did not meet state legal disclosure requirements, meaning that it was not clear she was giving up the right to a jury trial when she enrolled in the plan. "If the position he is asserting prevails in court, it could provide benefit to people in similar situations, anyone in an HMO seeking a way out of arbitration," says Michael Bidart, a Claremont attorney who was a lead litigator of claims in the Northridge earthquake.

Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, says that "bottom line, this could mean that a very determined son has found an escape hatch for the private justice system that has never worked appropriately for patients."

Kaiser officials say that no legal precedent is at stake in the case, and that in any event Kaiser has changed its enrollment forms in recent years. But with 6 million members in California, the HMO isn't taking any chances. In the last 4 1/2 years, Kaiser has enlisted three major law firms to take on Yedalian and his one-man cause. The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1999.