Progressive Asian Network for Action (PANA)We will never win major healthcare reform without addressing healthcare inequality. There will be no victory without the engagement and empowerment of communities that suffer from actual existing healthcare disparities in the U.S.
More information about CalCare and AB1690:
https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/california-nurses-renew-fight-for-guaranteed-health-care
PANA will once again join ground-game forces to pressure legislators to advance this “single-payer” bill to the Governor’s desk in 2024.
Fierce, dogged organizing by nurses and our community allies is the reason why CalCare advanced through the Assembly Health and Appropriations committees last session and why CalCare is on the table again,” said Puneet Maharaj, California Nurses Association’s government relations director. “The billion-dollar insurance industry will come forward with their lies, complaints, and army of lobbyists but nurses see every day why Californians desperately need CalCare. We have the facts and the people behind us. In partnership with Assemblymember Kalra, who has shown his dedication to CalCare, we’re ready to take on corporations who stand against health justice
https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/california-nurses-renew-fight-for-guaranteed-health-care
According to polling published in October 2021, 65% of Californians with low-incomes support the establishment of a “single-payer” health care system that provides comprehensive care for all.
PANA will advocate that such a major reform measure should insure everyone in the state, regardless of employment or immigration status and explicitly addresses healthcare inequality that is integral to the current for-profit only system.
The California Nurses Association (CNA), affiliated with National Nurses United, has played a key role in keeping the fight for CalCare alive, along with many grass-roots, “ground game” organizations such as PANA and Save Our Seniors Network and the many voters who delivered a CA Presidential Primary victory to Senator Bernie Sanders in 2020. The union of 100,000 registered nurses, in partnership with Kalra, plans to continue growing support for this effort, both inside and outside of the state’s capitol.
“California nurses are renewing our fight to put health care back in the hands of people, not the insurance companies hunting for their next buck,” said California Nurses Association President Sandy Reding. “With an even larger Democratic supermajority this session, there are no excuses for Sacramento to deny Californians guaranteed health care through CalCare. Nurses look forward to working with Assemblymember Kalra to build support for a single-payer health care system that puts patients above profits.”
https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/california-nurses-renew-fight-for-guaranteed-health-care
As we have in previous rounds of this ongoing fight, PANA members will continue to educate members of various Asian American and Pacific Islander communities about the need to support this important struggle which will impact all families. To win this fight to defeat the for-profit interests of the powerful healthcare insurers and big pharmaceutical industry, we must engage broader numbers of people to address existing inequalities in the healthcare system. AB 1690, must address the specific cultural and linguistic needs of these communities, the majority of whom are immigrant and working-class.
Please join us in this fight.
Carmen Comsti is the lead regulatory policy specialist for the California Nurses Association / National Nurses United (CNA/NNU). PANA has had the honor and pleasure of having her join previous forums we have held to address the need for comprehensive healthcare reform. She has also served for the last two years on Governor Newsom’s Healthy California for All Commission on behalf of the nurses in CNA/NNU and our single-payer movement in California, appointed to that body in December 2019.
Gavin Newsom was elected to CA governor, in large part, because he promised to deliver single-payer healthcare reform to all Californians. The purpose of the Commission was to develop a plan for such a major reform “through a unified financing system, including, but not limited to a single payer financing system,” and to deliver a report with its findings by 2021.
The research and discussions held by the Commission occurred at the same time the grass-roots movement for single-payer reform continued at the ground level, a movement that PANA has been a part of since its inception. Our last attempt, AB 1400, fell short of votes needed in the CA Assembly, once again due to the monied interest controlling a majority of elected officials in Sacramento.
Carmen Comsti shares her views on how, despite the forward strides of the larger “Medicare-for-All” movement made in the past few years, the Commission failed to meet the obligations of its mission to move the state towards a single-payer healthcare system. Please read her statement here:
https://medicareforall.medium.com/why-i-voted-no-on-the-healthy-california-for-all-commission-final-report-ccbb019c151f
Boston Globe
Kay Lazar
April 20, 2022
“Those in Chinatown or the working communities in Malden and Quincy are often invisible,” said Carolyn Wong, a political scientist at the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass.
Wong said she embarked on research to help widen the public’s perception of Asian Americans, who are often stalked by a “model minority myth.”
“The impression that policy makers and a lot of the public have is just looking at the better off [Asian Americans],” Wong said.
“The movies, TV, a lot of media images, or ideas people have about how well off Asians are, come from the successful scientists and medical folks, and those are the ones who are more prominent in the public’s mind,” she said.
Wong and her UMass coauthor, Ziting Kuang, surveyed 192 mostly low- and middle-income Asian Americans in 2020 and early 2021 in Greater Boston and found that roughly 75 percent reported working jobs that placed them at higher risk for COVID, and about 40 percent reported feeling very or extremely worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage.
A third said they were very or extremely afraid they would run out of food because of a lack of money.
Income inequality, the report found, is the greatest among Asian Americans, displacing Black people as the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the country.
The large gap in experiences the UMass researchers found between wealthy and low-income Asian Americans mirrors the findings of a 2018 Pew Research Center report that found income inequality rising most rapidly among that group. It found that income distribution among Asian Americans transformed from being one of the most equal to being the most unequal among the United States’ major racial and ethnic groups.
In preparation for the Appropriations hearing, PANA member Steven Gibson initiated a meeting with the staff of Appropriations Chair, Chris Holden (AD 41). Holden was “not able to attend the meeting” but constituents from AD 41 and a diverse group of community representatives shared various reasons for why AB 1400 should be supported by the committee and advanced to a floor vote by January 31.
The constituents and community advocates spoke passionately about various reasons for Holden to support AB 1400:
Teachers and mothers described how kids in Pasadena will directly benefit as a result of this bill.
It was pointed out how Asian immigrants and especially elderly Asians and Pacific Islanders will benefit since they have high percentages of seniors and bilingual needs.
Healthcare organizers described how the nurses and healthcare workers in major local hospitals around Pasadena are strong supporters of AB 1400 since their union is one of the initiators of the bill. About 2,500 nurses at Huntington Memorial, Arcadia Methodist, and San Gabriel Valley Med. Center are represented or affiliated with the CA Nurses Association.
Send a letter to the Appropriations Committee
Read the article posted on TheConversation.com
https://theconversation.com/asian-american-young-adults-are-the-only-racial-group-with-suicide-as-their-leading-cause-of-death-so-why-is-no-one-talking-about-this-158030
Racially motivated violence looks like the mass shootings that killed Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Chung Park, Hyun Grant and Suncha Kim in Atlanta on March 16, 2021. Racially motivated violence also looks like suicide, which is defined as a deliberate act of self-directed violence in order to cause injury to oneself that results in death.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. When broken down by race, suicide is the first leading cause of death among Asian American young adults age 15-24. This is true of no other racial group in this age range in America.
AB 1400 calls for the implementation of policies to ensure that all residents of this state have access to medically appropriate, coordinated mental health services.
This bill is also historic, in that it directly addresses the need for multilingual and culturally-appropriate health services. These are of particular concern for Asian American communities, which are nearly 60% immigrant in demographic composition.
January 5, 2022
Assembly Member Jim Wood, Chair and Members
Assembly Health Committee
RE: AB 1400 (Kalra, Lee, Santiago) – SUPPORT
Dear Chair Wood and Committee Members,
The Asian American community is experiencing an upsurge in hate crimes due to scapegoating of Chinese people as being the cause of the pandemic. Racist violence is not a new thing for Asian Americans as discrimination has been a historical condition – not just on the streets, but through systemic racism, including disparities in healthcare.
In 2018, 25 percent of Korean Americans and 20 percent of Vietnamese Americans had no health coverage. The Affordable Care Act helped alleviate those numbers, but no updates have been conducted after millions lost their jobs and insurance during the pandemic. Asian American data research is lacking and facts, such as 69% of the Thai American community being uninsured, are not well known.
In 2019, the leading cause of death among Asian Americans aged 15-24 was suicide. To this day, suicide is still among the top causes of death for young Asian Americans. In the U.S., this is true for no other racial group in the same age range. The mental healthcare system is inadequate and inaccessible to many.
Last year, over 80 Japanese American seniors in a Los Angeles intermediate care facility were evicted from their home because the corporate owner wanted to convert it to market-rate apartments. Even against the pleas of 10 licensed physicians, the CA government did not keep them safe during the pandemic. No other intermediate care facilities in the U.S. have the same level of Japanese-speaking staff and culturally-appropriate services.
Assembly Bill 1400 would provide groups facing healthcare disparities the help they need. The bill would create a single payer healthcare system that would cover all Californians regardless of citizenship, age, income, or employment status.
Under AB 1400, young people can access mental health services and elders can receive bilingual and bi-cultural healthcare. Non-English speaking people can have difficulty explaining their problems to medical staff, especially if they’re under duress. Doctors and nurses who only know a Western viewpoint, may not know how to communicate with patients of different cultures.
Hate crime victims and their families will no longer need to launch GoFundMe pages to pay for medical treatment due to lack of health coverage.
California has 85 percent of Democratic voters who support a single payer system and 61 percent of voters of various political views support it. The public support for AB1400 is there because the need exists. Our current governor was elected partially because he pledged to support single-payer reform. To have 3.2 million Californians without healthcare insurance in our wealthy state is a travesty.
AB1400 will be the safety net for our most vulnerable communities who are suffering in silence due to healthcare racism and inequality. This is why members of the Progressive Asian Network for Action (PANA) back this bill and urge you to vote “Aye” for AB 1400, which will save many lives.
Thank you for your service.
Sincerely,
Steering Committee
Progressive Asian Network for Action
Episode 213: Antiracism in Medicine Series – Episode 13 – Centering Asian Americans: Racism, Violence, and Health
CPSolvers: Anti-Racism in Medicine Series
Episode 13: Centering Asian Americans: Racism, Violence, and Health
Show Notes by Naomi F. Fields
December 21, 2021
Summary: This episode is about racism faced by Asian-Americans, why it often goes unrecognized, and how we can work to rectify these wrongs. This discussion is hosted by Jazzmin Williams, Rohan Khazanchi, MPH, and Jennifer Tsai MD, MEd, as they interview Thu Quach, PhD, an epidemiologist and galvanizing leader who has led the Asian Health Services (Oakland, CA) in addressing racial disparities in COVID-19, and Tung Nguyen, MD, a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a nationally-renowned health disparities researcher. Our inspiring guests help us to contextualize struggles faced by Asian-Americans even as they outline and energize within us a path forward – together.
Content Warning: This episode contains themes of violence, trauma-induced mental health concerns, and brief mentions of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255, that’s 800-273-TALK.
December 11, 2021
Facebook Event Page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/834849197249482
Maya Srikrishnan
Voices of San Diego
In San Diego County, Filipinos accounted for about 7 percent of the 4,000 COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic’s first year, while they make up roughly 6.5 percent of the county population. That made Filipinos the third largest nationality for pandemic deaths in the county during that time.
Filipinos faced a unique set of risks. Many Filipinos work in the health care sector or in other essential, high-risk employment, like in assisted living facilities. They also tend to live in multigenerational households, and suffer from certain health conditions that increase morbidity with COVID, like diabetes and hypertension. The majority of Filipinos who died, 92 percent, were immigrants, while only 8 percent were U.S.-born.
But because Filipino deaths and cases weren’t specifically tracked by the county – grouped instead with other Asian nationalities, which had lower numbers of cases and deaths – community advocates and researchers said that the community didn’t get the support and resources it needed.
Take a listen: https://theworld.org/media/2021-01-29/pacific-islanders-hit-hard-covid-19
‘Alisi Tulua, project director of the Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander COVID-19 Data Policy Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells Marco Werman that while California is easing its lockdown restrictions, Native Hawaiian and Pacific islanders in the state are still experiencing high infection rates.
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