Thousands of low-income patients, some seriously ill, are scrambling to find new doctors as they lose access to UCLA Health physicians after a longtime Medi-Cal contract was not renewed.

Under the contract that expired June 30, UCLA had been providing specialty care to 9,000 medically frail patients from Health Care LA, an association of nonprofit clinics that serve patients covered by Medi-Cal, the state program for the poor.

“Many of these patients have been waiting for months to be seen by UCLA specialty medicine providers and are now being told they cannot receive the care they desperately need,” Health Care LA said in a Thursday news release.

The patients had gone to UCLA for cancer and infectious-disease treatments, high-risk women’s services, major organ transplants and other specialty medicine care, the association said.

A Friday news conference that Health Care LA had scheduled to detail the problems patients faced in getting care was abruptly canceled when the two sides said they had reached a tentative agreement on how to transition the patients to other doctors over the next year.

“To help ensure a smooth transition for patients, both organizations have agreed that established UCLA Health patients, individuals with existing appointments, and patients requiring other agreed-upon services will continue to be cared for at UCLA Health facilities,” Phil Hampton, a university spokesman, said in a statement.

Although some patients will continue to be seen by UCLA doctors, he said, “accepting an unlimited number of new referrals presents challenges given existing capacity constraints and the need to preserve timely access for existing patients.”

Sabra Matovsky, chief executive of Health Care LA, said in an interview on Thursday that UCLA had declined to renegotiate the contract.

“They never even asked us for a raise,” she said, “They just want us out.”

She said that university officials had pointed to “capacity issues” at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, including in the emergency room and dozens of specialty clinics.

“To solve this by pushing out Medi-Cal patients while you continue to expand and market and take on other patients is not a solution,” Matovsky said.

Hampton said UCLA had offered to extend the contract, but Health Care LA rejected the offer.

The end of the Medi-Cal contract disappointed some UCLA medical professionals who have been urging the public university to provide care to more of L.A. County’s low-income residents.

“It feels like this is profits over patients,” said Dr. Patrick Samones, a fellow at UCLA Health, who trained at the university in family medicine.

“UCLA is one of L.A.’s most important healthcare institutions,” said Samones, who represents members of the Committee of Interns and Residents, which is part of Service Employees International Union. “We feel it has a duty to serve all Californians.”

In recent years, UCLA Health has been expanding fast and now has almost 300 locations throughout Southern California, including in wealthier places such as Montecito, Malibu and Westlake Village.

At the same time, it provides less care to Medi-Cal patients than its sister university health systems: UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and UC Davis, according to university statistics.

Last year, about 15% of UCLA Health’s net patient service revenue came from Medi-Cal, according to the university health systems’ annual report. The four other UC health systems each received about 22% of that revenue from Medi-Cal.

About 40% of L.A. County residents are insured by Medi-Cal, according to a recent report by the California Health Care Foundation.

Hampton said the net patient service revenue data from the annual report doesn’t capture UCLA’s “extensive contributions to caring for Medi-Cal patients” and isn’t “a fair basis for comparing academic health systems.”

He added that with the university’s expansion of clinics, “we are providing substantial specialty care to Medi-Cal and Medicare patients” throughout L.A. County.

“Unlike county-owned hospitals, UCLA Health relies almost exclusively on patient care revenue to fund operations, expand access, recruit clinicians and invest in facilities and technology,” he said.

Hampton said UCLA has other contracts to serve Medi-Cal patients, which will continue. The health system also provides more than $270 million in unreimbursed care for low-income patients each year, he said, as well as primary and urgent care for people experiencing homelessness.

In addition, UCLA is spending $500 million to create a new neuropsychiatric hospital in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, he said.

“We continue to fortify our region’s safety net despite growing access demands and challenges,” Hampton said.

In the most recent fiscal year, he said, Medi-Cal patients comprised 26% of 336,600 inpatient days and 34% of 156,000 emergency department visits.

“UCLA Health’s long-standing commitment to serving vulnerable populations in Southern California is well-established,” he said.

Hampton said the net patient service revenue data doesn’t reflect the complexity of care delivered by UCLA and is affected by Medi-Cal reimbursement rates and payment policies, which vary by region and health plan.

“Over time, Medi-Cal reimbursement has not kept pace with the cost of providing care, and UCLA Health has experienced increasing payment denials and delays,” he said.

UCLA specialists had been caring for Health Care LA’s seriously ill patients under the contract since 2009.

“They were the provider that did all the complicated care,” Matovsky said. “UCLA was our go-to.”

When the largest fire recorded in the history of Channel Islands National Park erupted on Santa Rosa Island in May, observers feared for the park’s rare Torrey pines.

On Tuesday, the National Park Service released grim news: Up to 80% of the grove’s trees could die as a result of the fire, which burned nearly 40% of the 18,000-acre island from May 15 to June 4.

The Torrey pine is among the rarest species of pine trees in the world, according to the National Park Service. It grows naturally in only two known locations: Santa Rosa Island and Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve in La Jolla.

The grove on Santa Rosa Island, which sits about 26 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, is a genetically distinct subspecies that occurs nowhere else on Earth. More than 24,000 Torrey pines were recorded on Santa Rosa in the most recent survey in 2014, the park service said, including 3,000 mature, cone-producing trees.

Ignited by a shipwrecked sailor’s emergency flare, the fire was first reported on the island’s southwestern coast in the early morning hours of May 15.

Because the fire was burning at a low intensity when it tore through the grove area three days later, park officials were initially hopeful that damage to the trees would be limited. In the immediate aftermath of the blaze, the grove appeared intact.

But subsequent investigation found that 60% to 80% of the grove’s trees were scorched, according to a report released Tuesday from the fire’s Burned Area Emergency Response team.

Exposed roots of mature trees sustained heavy damage, and scratch tests on most trees produced no sap — a sign that heat “effectively destroy[ed] the tree’s internal plumbing,” the report stated.

“The potential loss of so many mature Torrey pines is heartbreaking,” Channel Islands National Park Supt. Ethan McKinley said in a statement. “But we must resolve ourselves to  focus on what we can save, and the next few months are critical.”

Park officials are concerned that intense storms predicted for this winter could wash away the topsoil needed for the grove’s restoration. Crews have already covered the fragile area with 4,500 linear feet of wattles, long tubes whose natural fibers hold soil in place, the National Park Service said.

“The understory of the Torrey pines forest is basically completely gone. There are no more shrubs, just bare ground under the trees,” said Matt Guilliams, a senior principal investigator with the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden who is leading a post-fire census of the island’s Torrey pines.

Park staff have also collected more than 14,000 seeds released from the pine cones. Viable seeds will be planted and raised in a nursery until the seedlings can be planted in the grove.

Though the arrival of a super El Niño in the fire’s wake is “not great timing,” Guilliams said he is hopeful for the grove’s recovery, and it is still too early to know for certain how many trees will ultimately succumb to fire damage. Several of the island’s perennial plant species are already resprouting in the burn area, he said.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — a $4.3-billion sister to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes — launched into space Sunday morning on a SpaceX rocket with space enthusiasts and scientists from around the world looking on.

Once fully operational, the observatory is expected to vastly expand scientists’ inventory of planets outside our solar system, increasing it from about 6,300 planets to more than 100,000. Scientists aim to find some of those with a cutting-edge instrument built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

“It’s a little bit like having a kid go off to college,” said Vanessa Bailey, JPL instrument scientist for the planet-hunter, called a coronagraph. “You’re used to having it around, being able to go visit it when you want, and now, it’s out in the world.”

Roman will also complete detailed surveys of the sky to help physicists better understand “dark matter,” which pulls the universe together, and “dark energy,” which pushes it apart.

Caltech will play a leading role in managing Roman’s scientific operations.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying Roman lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:26 a.m. Pacific. As the rocket rumbled along the Space Coast, nerves turned into catharsis for JPL scientists and engineers looking on.

“I had my hands over the rails, white knuckles, as we were counting down — and then, just, tears streaming down my face as she went up,” said Alina Kiessling, a JPL research scientist who studies dark matter and dark energy.

She watched alongside her husband, JPL Roman project scientist Jason Rhodes, from the space center. Shortly after launch, their nanny at a nearby Airbnb shared a video of their two children, ages 5 and 1, watching, too.

The rocket successfully deployed the 18,000-pound telescope about 31 minutes after launch. Roman then opened its array of solar panels and sunshades, which power the craft and keep its sensitive instruments cool.

In the middle of a post-launch news conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s phone began to ring. “The president is excited about Roman,” he said.

“I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you. It looked beautiful on television,” President Trump (who proposed killing the project multiple times) said on speakerphone. “You are doing a fantastic job.”

Roman was initially projected to come in over budget, but a significant course correction helped the telescope launch on budget and ahead of schedule.

While JPLers are already planning their celebrations, Roman coronagraph project manager Feng Zhao said the team wouldn’t truly be able to relax “anytime soon.”

Over the next three months, Roman will deploy its antenna, adjust its course, and power on its two instruments: JPL’s planet hunter and a night-sky surveyor called the Wide Field Instrument.

Roman’s final destination is the same cosmic parking lot where the James Webb Space Telescope resides: a million miles from Earth, far past the moon. At this spot, Earth’s and the sun’s gravity create a stable point, allowing the spacecraft to better conserve fuel.

Then, it’s time for some “very cool science,” Zhao said.

Once in operation, the Coronagraph Instrument will attempt to observe planets that are 100 million times dimmer than their host star, a significant improvement over James Webb. To do it, the instrument can maneuver a flexible mirror with near-atomic-scale precision to focus the bright starlight into a pinprick, then block it with a mask so it can observe the dim planet.

Those observations will inform an aspirational future mission — the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which aims to view Earth-like planets more than 1 billion times dimmer than their host stars.

The Wide Field Instrument will focus on observing the night sky with the clarity of Hubble, but cover a vastly greater area than the 36-year-old observatory. With this, scientists hope to better understand dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible but make up 95% of the universe.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with the space observatory Roman Telescope launching at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Sunday.

(Joel Kowsky / NASA / AP)

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Scientists do not yet know whether dark matter is made up of ancient black holes lurking throughout space, undiscovered heavy and slow particles, or unknown lighter and faster particles. The different theories provide different answers for how dark matter should clump. By looking at how dark matter’s gravity bends the light of galaxies, Roman will be able to measure this clumping.

As for dark energy, scientists long thought its strength has remained constant throughout the universe’s history. However, recent observations suggest it is weakening — potentially jeopardizing Einstein’s so far unblemished theory of general relativity and calling into question the leading description for how the universe will die.

Scientists hope Roman’s observations, paired with other cutting-edge space and ground-based telescopes, will help settle whether dark energy is constant, or if the recent measurements point to deeper problems in our understanding of the universe.

NASA anticipates the telescope’s first images will come in early 2027.

“Doing things like this — launching a telescope into space to uncover the mysteries of the universe — this is the best of humanity. This is what we can aspire to as a species,” Rhodes said shortly after launch. “So, I’m on top of the world.”