Featuring Ellen Karel, the chair of Health Care for All-California, and host Brenda Gazzar, discussing the life experiences that lead her to advocate for healthcare equity and what is keeping California from embracing single-payer healthcare.
This is part one of a two-part series.
An Offense to Justice & Humanity?
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host, Brenda Gazzar.
Who is the new chair of Health Care for All-California? How did she become a Medicare for All supporter? Ellen Karel has advocated for single payer universal health care for 15 years. She has a background in language teaching and journalism and worked for a decade in San Francisco’s Latinx community.
(5-minute stinger music)
Welcome to Code WACK! Ellen.
Karel: Thank you, Brenda. Happy to be here.
Q: So happy to have you. What a fascinating, professional life you’ve had. And at one time you lived in France. What took you there and what was that like?
Karel: Well, when I was in college, I had a social studies field major but I had a French minor. And so in my junior year, I participated in the program in Bordeaux, France, and incidentally I had a friend there who later became the director of the hospital system in Bordeaux and got some further insights into how a universal health care system works, and then I went back with the support from the Rotary Club. They had awards that they were giving to college graduates and I went back a few years later and spent another year in Strasbourg France, and both times I was studying. I was enrolled in classes and lived there and I really enjoyed it.
Q: What struck you about their universal health care system in France?
Karel: Health care there, as I’ve seen it, is not an issue for most people. It’s not something they worry about. It’s not something they have to save for. It’s not something they go bankrupt about. It’s just taken as one of the things that they pay their taxes for and get services for and they’re covered together and basically, it’s almost a non-issue. The issue is getting the care, going to the doctor, making the appointments. It’s not about can I go to the doctor and how am I going to pay for it?
Q: Hmmm. Wow. So what drew you to the Medicare for All movement?
Karel: Actually, it was just a chance occurrence. I had been talking to a friend about some healthcare issues that some of my students had been having and she said ‘why don’t you come to a meeting of Health Care for All? This is an organization here. We are in Marin. We have a chapter. And the woman who had helped found the state organization and also the Marin chapter had organized a meeting with our Congressperson, with our local state officials, with others and brought in people who had had problems with health care, and it was a long event that really drove home for me what the problems were with the healthcare system and how it impacts every single person, whether or not you’ve got good insurance or no insurance. You have family. You have friends. You live in a society where health care is really important, and it affects kids’ education if they are sick and can’t get care, they can’t go to school, other kinds of things like that.
And I have to say it was the exact words of then-Senator Mark Leno, who did promote two single-payer bills that really got to me and brought tears to my eyes. The way he explained and described how important easy access to the health care you need when you need it is so vital to the wellbeing of all of us. Even though it seems obvious, the way he said it really hit me and I said, I am going to go to these meetings. I’m going to find out some more and I’m going to work for this issue.
Q: Nice. You mentioned hearing some stories from your students or knowing that your students were having issues with healthcare or their families were. Can you talk about that?
Karel: Most of my students are working two jobs to maintain their families and themselves, and still don’t have any kind of discretionary money and so any kind of payment that they have to make for health care is a challenge for them. We do have public programs. We do have community clinics, especially in places like Marin frankly that are there for students, for people. However, what happens is that the availability of certain kinds of care is very limited for people with limited incomes and we are talking about Medi-Cal programs or even community clinics that rely on sometimes volunteer participation of doctors and specialists, this kind of thing.
So anyhow, I did see students who would come to school sick or would miss school because they were sick because they couldn’t go to the doctor and get the medicine or the treatment that they needed. They would tell me about their families, about their kids who are having medical problems and couldn’t get the care they needed when they needed it so they’d have to wait for an MRI or they’d have to wait to see the doctor to get a prescription for some medicine and it was always these waits because of the scarcity of the medical professionals and the volume of care that was available to people who had to depend on certain kinds of programs that made it difficult for them.
Q: Is there a specific story in your mind that sticks out of somebody that was waiting either for an MRI or a story that you remember that really touched you or affected you?
Karel: I remember this one woman who was on one of the marketplace, you know Covered California plans and she had a fairly good job and was overqualified for Medi-Cal but did qualify for the plan. However, she still had to pay a copay of maybe $50 or $60 to go to the doctor, and she went, she paid it and went to the doctor and he said well, you know, we have to do some tests and then we have to have to see you again, and she didn’t have the money for that. So there were co-pays for that, and even though it was subsidized, there were some co-pays that kept her from getting the care she needed.
Q: Wow. So do you know what happened to her?
Karel: No, I don’t know what happened to her because she was in my class one semester, but I do know that many of my students and many people I know, do have these issues where they hesitate to go to the doctor because they’re going to have to pay something, and then even if they pay it, they don’t know if they’re going to get the care that they need right away. They may have to go back and so they don’t even go.
Q: And how do you feel about that as an educator?
Karel: It is devastating to see people who are good-hearted, hard working, good to other people in their communities, respectful, doing everything they can to survive in this country, and to have to face these hurdles, which are cruel that are placed there to deprive them of care, because that’s how I see it. I know that in this country, in this state, we can — we can — offer health care to everybody. It is proven, it has been studied. We know it. We know this is a political issue, not an issue of whether we can, it’s whether we will, and the fact that we are not going to a single-payer system to cover everybody in a cost effective way that helps taxpayers and our economy that makes perfect sense, except to the people who are making money and profits off of this system is tantamount to me to a crime, to an assault. It offends my sense of justice and humanity that we cannot, we will not provide health care for everybody because we want to protect a system that favors profits over people.
Thank you, Ellen Karel.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV App. You can also subscribe to Code WACK! wherever you find your podcasts. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for health care reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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