MEDICAL CARE: THE SOUL OF AN HMO

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The second declaration stunned the deMeurerses, who saw it as one more violation of the doctor-patient relationship. "It felt like the same thing we had gone through with Dr. Gupta," Alan says. Suddenly he and his wife believed they had a new worry: Would UCLA really come through on its offer? And would the care be as good as if someone else were paying? "Our first inclination after we heard about Dr. Glaspy was, maybe we ought to go back to Denver," Alan says.

At the last minute, UCLA put its promise to pay in writing, thus ending the need for an injunction. On Sept. 23 Christy entered the medical center to begin treatment. Whether the treatment worked or not depends on who is speaking. Health Net officials are quick to point out how soon Christy "expired" after the procedure. Glaspy says the transplant may actually have shortened her life relative to what she might have expected with standard therapy. But Alan deMeurers recalls how the day before she entered UCLA, she could barely carry a sewing box from one room of their home to another. Within several weeks of her discharge, Alan returned home from work to find her mowing the lawn. She had four apparently disease-free months. "As hard as it was to go through all that, it was worth it," Alan says. "That's one thing Health Net never took into consideration at all, was quality of life."

By spring 1994, she had fallen ill again. That summer the family took a cross-country camping trip expressly with the goal of building happy memories for the children. A friend arranged a behind-the-scenes tour of the White House, and the kids got to play with Socks, the Clintons' cat. Christy deMeurers spent one more Christmas with her family. She died on Friday afternoon, March 10, 1995.

Soon afterward, most of Health Net's top executives left the company, seeing little future for themselves in the coming merger with the WellPoint Health Network. But in the new medicine, even leaving a company can prove immensely profitable.

On March 31 Greaves signed a new severance deal that paid him a lump sum of $2.8 million, plus assorted other payments, and guaranteed him and his wife health care for the rest of their lives. The agreement also called for Health Systems International to buy back as much as half of his common stock, which brought him another $13.3 million. And Greaves signed a generous three-year consulting deal. All told, his exit brought him $18.1 million, equivalent to the average monthly premiums paid by nearly 134,000 subscribers.

Last October the arbitration panel hearing Christy's case determined that Health Net should indeed have paid for the transplant. It also found the company had crossed the line in interfering with the doctor-patient relationship, specifically when Health Net officials phoned Christy's local oncologist and UCLA's Slamon. The latter call "was more heavy-handed" than either man was willing to admit, the panel concluded, and had been made to "influence or intimidate" UCLA and its doctors. Two of the three panelists further saw this interference as constituting "intentional infliction of emotional distress" on the deMeurerses because it triggered Glaspy's second declaration opposing Christy's injunction. The panel awarded Alan deMeurers $1.02 million.