Heart Doctor Proves a Lightning Rod for Health Care Reform : Thousand Oaks: Irving Loh has earned a following as a White House adviser. But controversy dogs him.

The lights go down, and Irving Loh, M.D., goes on.

Wielding a pencil flashlight that projects a little red dot, Loh gestures at a screen displaying key points of President Clinton’s health care reform package.

“This is not going to be the Mercedes-Benz of plans, but neither will it be the Yugo of plans,” Loh tells the skeptical audience in the darkened auditorium. “It will be the Buick of plans.”

As a self-appointed pitchman for health care reform, Loh rolls through a few more jokes to warm up the crowd at the Westlake Hyatt.

He knows it will take considerable effort to persuade America, not to mention conservative Ventura County, that the President’s still sketchy proposals will solve the country’s health care crisis.

But Loh, 46, a Thousand Oaks cardiologist and member of the White House Health Care Reform Briefing Team, thinks he is just the person to try.

“Here’s a health care reform reality check: 750 groups have already registered opposition to the health care plan,” Loh says, pausing for a pregnant moment. “And they haven’t even seen it!”

His audience breaks up in laughter, while he regards them with a wry smile. “Hey, it’d be funny, guys, if it wasn’t true,” he warns. “They will be playing on the fears of the public. The day after the plan is unveiled, there will be media spots everywhere. They’ll want to un-focus you.”

No one has asked Loh to spread the President’s message. He does not get paid for his weekly speeches before civic groups across Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley. Some of his colleagues in the county’s medical community privately whisper that he just wants the attention, but Loh says he lectures because he thinks it’s important.

Loh has worked as a cardiologist at Los Robles Regional Medical Center since 1980. A man with a knack for effective self-promotion, he directs that hospital’s high-profile Ventura Heart Institute, regularly gives speeches in the county on preventing heart disease, and even once appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” to discuss “risk factors in premature coronary disease.”

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Last year, he said, his concern over the looming health care crisis prompted him to donate time and money to Barbara Boxer’s winning U.S. Senate campaign and Bill Clinton’s presidential bid.

When President Clinton assembled a team of 500 consultants to advise his wife Hillary’s Health Care Task Force, Loh was one of the 40 doctors in the group. He traveled to Washington three times to meet with members of the Health Care Task Force and offer his opinions on their proposals.

Then he came home and, restless as ever, began giving speeches about what he’d learned.

He has addressed skeptical business professionals, enthusiastic Democratic Club reformers, and even out-of-town physician groups, doing each engagement for free in his zeal to make converts. The sessions are not only well-attended, they are sometimes standing-room-only.

In fact, the only people who don’t show up are doctors from Los Robles Regional Medical Center, the hospital where he practices.

Though widely regarded as one of the most brilliant physicians in the east county area, Loh is also one of the most controversial. Colleagues chafe at his public popularity, which grew slowly over the years as he ran the Ventura Heart Institute and is peaking now with his health care reform speeches.

His detractors call him arrogant and self-aggrandizing, a publicity hound whose genius for attracting attention far outpaces his talents in the examining room.

His supporters--who grow in number outside of Thousand Oaks--describe him as an extremely talented, energetic man whose predilection for patting himself on the back provides fuel to the flame of those who find him threateningly intelligent and unusually market-savvy.

Loh says he is just different.

“I’ve always been an outsider (among physicians) here,” he said. “I don’t play golf, own a boat, fly a plane, go drinking with those guys.”

What Loh does have is his finger in many different pots. In addition to directing Los Robles’ Ventura Heart Institute, a facility Loh bills as offering preventive care for heart disease, he also runs a private cardiology practice.

His curriculum vitae --which is 17 pages long and duly notes every speech given, every paper published--also lists him as a member of the board of directors of the American Heart Assn.’s Conejo Valley branch; an advisory board member to Heart Healthy Living Magazine; and a “principal” or “participating investigator” in at least 10 ongoing drug studies.

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Basically, Loh says, he gets bored easily and it takes a lot to keep him entertained. “My entire life, I’ve always changed gears every 10 years or so,” he said. “The research activities and work I do are what makes medicine fun for me.”

Loh’s latest diversion is health care reform, a cause which has held his attention for at least the last year.

It is his duty as a doctor, he explains, to “give something back” to the community. Lately, he said, the overwhelming problem he and his patients face is the runaway expense and bureaucracy of a bloated health care system.

“I’ve had patients crying in my office because they can’t afford (health care) costs,” he said. “I was supplying drug samples to elderly patients on fixed incomes because they couldn’t afford to buy their medications and eat, too. It’s an outrage, an absolute outrage.”

Loh’s involvement in preventive care also helped spark his interest in the reform movement, he said. Insurance companies, he noticed, say they encourage preventive care. But they balk at picking up the bill when a healthy patient comes in for a checkup because his family has a high incidence of heart disease, he said.

“They pay lip service to preventive care, so do the hospitals, but they don’t do anything for it,” he said.

Loh does not spare his own hospital or medical community from criticism--an attitude that has earned him the enmity of some colleagues.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen with this health care reform thing,” said a Thousand Oaks doctor who has known Loh since he started at Los Robles 13 years ago. “But what’s so typical of Irv is we’ll be sitting around in a meeting, trying to figure out what’s going on, and he’ll sit around and tell everyone they’re wrong. When you ask him to explain himself, then he says he has information he can’t release.”

Some of the animosity from other physicians comes from Loh’s Ventura Heart Institute, which he set up with Los Robles in 1985 and he insists on running without the involvement of the other doctors. His public speeches, they complain, are nothing more than shameless self-promotion.

But Loh defends himself by pointing out that, in fact, he has spent more time with health care reform than most of his colleagues. “I do this because I am concerned,” he said. “Sure, it could bring in referrals, but you know, it’s a lot cheaper to advertise in the Yellow Pages.”

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Local physicians describe the Thousand Oaks medical community as a tight-knit, old-fashioned one. Doctors don’t just refer patients to each other, they socialize together.

As insurance companies have insisted on closer scrutiny of costs, many local physicians have formed partnerships or pooled their practices to cut overhead.

In this economic climate, physicians say they dread changes from the President’s proposed overhaul of the health care system. And some of them view Loh as a turncoat for serving as a consultant to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Health Care Task Force.

“My first reaction was, ‘How could he do it?’ ” admitted physician Paul Sanders, a longtime colleague and friend of Loh’s.

Loh said he suspected it might be an unpopular move, but has been surprised at the extent of reaction that his public crusade has caused in the medical community.

“There’s a backlash,” he acknowledged. “The last several months, it’s reached a crescendo. It’s really pretty tough right now.

“It’s hard for me to eat lunch in the doctor’s dining room without getting into a fairly heated discussion over what I’ve been saying. It’s hard when I walk into surgery and voices rise.”

On that point, at least, he’ll find little disagreement among his fellow doctors. When it comes to Irv Loh, every physician in town seems to have an opinion.

Some believe he has become the community’s whipping boy because he made himself an immediate target as a stand-in for Hillary Clinton. Others say it’s his superior attitude and habit of name-dropping that irritate his colleagues. His prestigious credentials also elicited envy.

The Stockton native began his college education at UC Berkeley. After making Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honors society, he transferred as a senior to UC San Francisco to finish his undergraduate degree concurrently with the first year of medical school in 1972.

A prestigious, three-year stint with the National Institutes of Health followed a two-year internal medicine residency at UC San Francisco’s Moffitt Hospital. Loh polished up his training with a two-year cardiology fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Over the years, he has served as an adjunct and assistant professor at Baylor University, UC Irvine and UCLA.

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Today, he works out of an elegantly appointed office in Los Robles’ east wing. A huge, gold-edged, Chinese fan decorates one open wall. On another hangs his medical degree from UC San Francisco and eight other degrees and certificates from the various medical boards and honors societies to which he belongs.

The bookshelf behind his granite-topped desk and black leather chair also holds glossy framed photographs of his wife, an attorney, and children.

“The reason why I became a physician,” Loh said, “is I feel that if you have the talent and the intellectual ability to do things . . . you’ve got to give something back.”

Loh says he will travel again to Washington next month, at the request of the Democratic National Committee, to help out with details concerning the President’s presentation of the health care plan. But before his plane flight east, another date looms ominously over his head--Sept. 14.

That is the day he gives his health care reform speech to the medical staff at Los Robles.

“That’s going to be a bloody meeting,” he said, laughing in nervous anticipation. “It will be a fireworks session, I guarantee you.”