Testimony / ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT HEALTH CARE : ‘I Need to Feel That I’m Helping to Balance the Scale’

Ann Turner is a 46-year-old doctor who graduated from USC Medical School. After working at the City of Hope for several years she went to Thailand and cared for Cambodian refugees. Twelve years ago, she and family nurse practitioner Catherine Bax opened the South-Central Family Health Center.

We’re the only private nonprofit community clinic in this area. Most of the patients we see are undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico and some from Central America. They don’t qualify for Medi-Cal, and most of the jobs they have don’t provide health insurance. Most people who have these people working in their homes don’t provide health insurance for them.

I don’t know if Zoe Baird (who withdrew her nomination for U.S. attorney general after it was revealed that she had employed undocumented workers) provided health insurance for the couple she had working for her; the press didn’t raise that issue, no one seemed to care. There’s a lack of awareness, even with people who basically are liberals, about their own employment practices, at least with undocumented workers. They are often very underpaid and I’ve never seen anyone provide health insurance.

There’s one woman patient whom we have been seeing for 10 years who works for a family in which both parents are physicians. She’s worked for them for at least 12 years, doing child care, housekeeper services, cooking, everything. She’s from Central America and the family did help her get her papers, and she feels very obligated to them for that.

They have three children, so she was there from 7 a.m. until 7 or 8 p.m. Many times she ended up staying the night, because by the time she could get home to inner-city L.A. on a bus at 9 p.m., it just wasn’t safe. She worked Saturdays as well, so she would have one day off and then repeat the whole cycle.

So this woman, who is nearing 50 now, was working a minimum 60-hour week and often more than that. Her employer, the two doctors, didn’t provide any health insurance. In fact, the woman doctor would call me from time to time to ask me why wasn’t I referring her housekeeper to a specialist. I told her that it would be very expensive, and asked her if they would be able to pay the cost for that specialist. She said, “No, I can’t afford that.”

The housekeeper was getting more and more stressed out and overworked. She had a family of her own, although by this time they were mostly grown, but they were teen-agers when this all started. It basically ruined her marriage, because she was never home. I told her employers that I really didn’t think that it was in this woman’s best interest to be working this many hours. She wasn’t being paid any overtime.

I talked to the patient and tried to tell her she had rights. I’d have to write her letters, begging her employers to give her some vacation time. I tried to appeal to these people. I said I thought they should provide her with some health insurance, and I suggested that maybe some of their doctor friends out at UCLA, where they worked, might volunteer. It wasn’t a life-threatening problem, but it was something that was really bothering her. They said that it wasn’t possible, they couldn’t afford it. It never made any sense to me. I’ve never talked to any employer who felt that they had any responsibility to provide health care or health insurance, pay into the worker’s social security--not one.

Particularly in California, our whole economy is built on underpaying people for jobs that are very similar to this. We have this whole group of people that we are able to exploit, because they are afraid that they are going to be found out and deported. If each of us took the responsibility to pay people a living wage, as well as providing them basic benefits, then we would have a much healthier society. The companies in our neighborhood--the Garment District, the restaurants and the grocery stores--that employ our patients provide insurance to a very small percentage of their employees. The majority of them don’t.

I think employers should be required to provide health-care insurance, with some kind of backup plan from the government for those businesses that really can’t afford it. For those people who aren’t employed or not employable, there has to be some kind of governmental insurance provided to them for basic health services.

Our clinic is right in the midst of violence and crime and we often get our cars broken into. Last week, two people on the same day got their batteries stolen, and sometimes we all get frustrated. But we take care of families, mostly women and children. Often the parents are working two jobs, their kids are in terrible schools. They are afraid at home, they’re afraid walking the streets. I’m amazed that they can survive as well as they do, trying to live in what must feel like a war zone.

Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t come by telling us about their neighbor or their son or nephew who was shot or killed. Yet life goes on, families work hard at jobs that, really, no one else will do, for salaries that none of us would even consider.

Some of our patients make $40 or $50 a week doing child care for some of these families who could afford to pay much more. Many employers, other than domestic, won’t hire people full time so that they won’t have to give them benefits. They’re paying them less than minimum wage. The employers will only pay them when there is work available, so maybe they will only work two days a week. Or one week they will work 60 or 80 hours and the next there won’t be any work. I’m angry at everyone, all of us, for being willing to develop a system in our country where more and more people are getting poor and a few people are getting better off. We’re just developing much more of a two-class society. Before the riots, everyone could just completely ignore areas like South-Central L.A., because you can live and work in L.A., do all the fun things, go to the beach, the Music Center and never see the poverty and the homeless. I’m angry that we as a country believe that health care is a privilege, not a right. I’m angry that we who are trying to provide health care with very limited resources have to beg for money, have great difficulty finding physicians to volunteer their time and hospitals that will donate their services to the uninsured.

I could leave and work in another part of town, but there aren’t many people who want to work in disenfranchised neighborhoods, and this is something that I want to do. I want to do something that makes a difference in people’s lives. Health care happens to be my skill, and I need to feel that I’m helping to balance the scale a little.