Chris Morris

By Timothy Pratt

Thu, Mar 6, 2008 (2 a.m.)

If you are one of the 40,000 people who should get blood tests because of a hepatitis outbreak and you don’t have health insurance, here’s hoping you have some time on your hands and don’t give up easily when getting the runaround.

Gary Vrooman, assistant director of the Nevada AIDS Project, learned this in the wake of last week’s revelations that the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada might have infected thousands with hepatitis B or C and HIV.

He thought he could get a quick answer for the uninsured who began calling his nonprofit organization Friday, wondering where they could get free tests for the viruses.

He noticed the full-page ad the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada had taken out Sunday. The ad offered the consolation that “a foundation is being set up to cover the cost” of tests, which could total more than $200 for many patients when the visit for the referral to the tests is taken into account.

Southern Nevada Health District officials and others said it is unknown how many of the thousands at risk lack health insurance. The issue is pressing in Nevada, however, because an estimated one in five people lacks insurance.

So Vrooman called the number listed at the top of the ad to find out more about the foundation, or any other source of help for the uninsured. So did the Sun. We had similar experiences.

On Monday a woman answered from a call center “near Phoenix.” She said phone lines of the center were down and would be back up Tuesday. For more information, call the Health District’s hotline.

On Tuesday the line was still down and the center apparently had figured out it would be cheaper to use a recorded message than to pay operators in Arizona. The message directed callers back to the Health District. Phoning the Health District’s hotline at 11:30 a.m. got another recorded message. Nothing on a foundation or free services. The recording directed callers to the Health District’s Web site.

Vrooman also heard this message. He looked first at the Web site’s listing of places offering HIV testing, the area he knows best. The only center of the five listed that is offering the service free, the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, is open only on Thursdays.

As for hepatitis B and C testing, the four clinics listed on the Health District’s Web site all belong to Nevada Health Centers, the main private source of health care for the valley’s poor.

Carl Heard, interim chief executive of Nevada Health Centers, said his clinics were following normal procedure: a sliding scale starting at $25 for the visit and $15 for each test. He added that he had heard LabCorp was offering free testing. If that were true, his clinics could pass the savings along to the uninsured, he said. But by Wednesday he still hadn’t been able to confirm whether LabCorp was offering free testing. “We wouldn’t turn anyone away” for being unable to pay for the visit and the tests, he added.

Eric Lindblom, spokesman for LabCorp, said Tuesday his company’s 15 local labs were indeed offering free tests to the uninsured.

Still, those patients might get bills in the mail because of a problem in the system. That could be fixed with a phone call, he said.

The company decided to offer the tests free because “it just seemed like the right thing to do,” Lindblom said.

Meanwhile, Vrooman, still unsure what to tell people calling his program, had been contacted by a local doctor, Michael Karagiozis, who said he had offered his services free at the Community Counseling Center, a Las Vegas nonprofit organization, on Saturday, working with LabCorp. He said he hoped to do the same from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. this Saturday.

Karagiozis called the uninsured “the most problematic group” among the 40,000 patients the Health District has notified.

“People with insurance are more likely to seek treatment early. The longer you go without treatment, the sicker you get,” he said.

Karagiozis said about 20 percent of the 87 patients he saw Saturday had no health insurance.

Vrooman began referring his callers to Karagiozis.

On Tuesday morning Vrooman saw a list on the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal titled “free testing.” He began calling the UMC Quick Care clinics on the list to confirm the information. The first two hadn’t heard they were offering free tests. The third referred Vrooman to a spokesman, who told him the information was incorrect. On Wednesday the Review-Journal corrected the mistake.

The Sun called the Health District’s hotline late Tuesday afternoon to see whether there was any information on the foundation mentioned in the Endoscopy Center ad. The ad’s phone message was referring callers to the hotline, after all. After we were on hold for 12 minutes, a call center in Colorado answered. The woman said she had no information on the foundation or any free testing, nothing about LabCorp, nothing about Karagiozis.

Later Tuesday, Jennifer Sizemore, spokeswoman for the Health District, said she didn’t know her agency’s number was being given out on the center’s message. As for the uninsured, she noted that her agency had asked the center how many of the 40,000 patients lacked insurance but never got an answer. She said a lot of the patients at the center were covered by private insurance or Medicaid.

She added that the Health District had been swamped and hadn’t heard from LabCorp or Karagiozis but would be glad to post the information if she could confirm it.

On Wednesday afternoon, a combination of chance and charity offered a new twist to the story. The foundation tied to Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the second-largest health insurance company in the valley, was looking for a way to help those who needed the tests and didn’t have insurance.

“We thought of offering a grant for free testing, but then we saw in the Review-Journal that there was lots of free testing,” said Sally Vogler, company spokeswoman. Then she discovered that the information was wrong. Long story short, as of Wednesday afternoon, she was waiting for a reply from Nevada Health Centers to see whether they would accept a $50,000 grant for free testing.

Looking back at several days of chasing leads, Vrooman is most critical of the Endoscopy Center. The ad gives the impression “we’re going to be there for you,” he said.

But in the end, at least when it comes to clear and accurate information, he thinks the uninsured in this crisis “are left to fend for themselves.”