L A Care

A publicly funded health plan is donating $200,000 to temporarily reopen four school-based medical clinics in Los Angeles County -- three of them in the San Fernando Valley -- that closed recently because of budget cuts. The grant from L.A. Care Health Plan will allow the clinics at four Los Angeles Unified School District campuses to operate for the next four months, said John Wallace, a spokesman for the county Department of Health Services.

Maribel Pantoja sat nervously on an examination table, awaiting word from her doctor about a painful wound on her left leg. Because she speaks only Spanish, there is usually an added level of anxiety when she visits a clinic. But a new first-in-the-nation state law requiring health insurers to provide interpreters for members with limited English skills spared Pantoja the confusion of trying to communicate with her doctor Tuesday.

Federal regulators have given a thumbs-up to Los Angeles County's massive foray into managed care for more than a million poor patients, allowing the program to swing into full gear the first of next year. "We're comfortable at this point, which we absolutely were not . . . before," said Linda Minamoto, a manager in the Medicaid division of the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration.

Re "Innovate to cut health costs," Opinion, Oct. 6 Shirley Svorny deplores government regulation of hospitals and medical professionals in one paragraph and in another claims that the reasons for rising healthcare cost are the lobbyists for the same institutions. She favors competition between hospitals and retail clinics with semi-professional staff to diagnose and treat the public. In other words, deregulate the entire industry to reduce health costs to the consumer. Where has Svorny been during the last two weeks?

Jon Bergen has been named national director of sales for the Gold Circle Music Label Group in Los Angeles. He is a former sales and marketing manager at Beyond Music. Michael Wybo has been named vice president of product strategy at Fasturn, a Los Angeles-based apparel industry services provider. Howard Kahn, a former Cigna senior executive, has been named chief executive of L.A. Care Health Plan, a nonprofit HMO based in Los Angeles.

An MRI exam of Holger Schubert's head might reveal an inner space of bare, winter-white walls, polished concrete, wall-to-ceiling glass and halogen lighting. "I like very pure, minimalistic, empty space," says the 41-year-old product designer. Schubert's home, under construction on two acres in Brentwood, will be a symphony in spareness: three glass boxes as the main living quarters, a pool house with cantilevered roof, a Japanese tea house and a glass-walled guest house facing an enormous Zen stone garden.

State health officials have accused a Southern California HMO that serves indigent Medi-Cal members of marketing fraud, mishandling of consumer complaints and making it hard for members to quit the health plan. The state warned Tower Health Services that it may ban the HMO from enrolling new members for 90 days unless the firm moves quickly to fix numerous problems cited in a June 10 audit report.

Just as Los Angeles County is poised to adopt managed care for Medi-Cal patients on an unprecedented scale, a coalition of consumer groups Thursday made a last-ditch plea to suspend automatic enrollment in the program statewide because of "ongoing deficiencies" and "mass confusion." Days before 1.