Featuring Amy Turk, LCSW, Chief Executive Officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness.
Why is it that 60% of the women on Skid Row are African-American? What happens when women become too sick to work and lose their health insurance? What programs promote access to health care for those experiencing homelessness? Amy Turk, a social worker and chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center, and host Brenda Gazzar discuss how Medicare for All could help deter homelessness.
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Amy Turk, Downtown Women’s Center (courtesy of Amy Turk)
How Medicare for All Could Help End Homelessness
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
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. Today we’ll continue our chat on homelessness and talk about the demographics of women on L.A.’s notorious Skid Row.
Amy Turk is the chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness. She’s held leadership positions in the field of social work and homeless services since 2001.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Amy.
Turk: Thank you, Brenda.
Q: You mentioned that the women that you work with are mainly women of color? Can you tell me what percentage?
Turk: Yeah, in the Skid Row community, 60% of the women are African American, and for context in Los Angeles County African Americans — both men and women — comprise 9% of our overall population so you can see the tremendous disproportionality and something that’s highly concerning to us and so we really work to, you know, make sure that we are meeting their needs through a culturally responsive lens. But obviously, we’re working within a system of racism that would produce that level of disproportionality.
When you look at all systems that have been designed to actually help people, whether it’s education or housing or health care, no matter what, the outcomes are always disproportionately negative to people of color, and within that African Americans usually, especially in urban locations, are more disproportionately impacted.
Q: Hmm. um-hmm. Okay. Is there a story of a woman that you could tell me that comes to mind that illustrates maybe they got insurance for the first time and what that did for them, or they’re still without insurance now and kind of what their situation is — or both?
Turk: Yeah. We worked with one woman who for 20 years she worked for LAUSD, L.A. Unified School District. She provided meals for kids and she loved her job, and she needed, though to leave her job because her symptoms of lupus became too hard for her, and she was 60 when she could no longer work. So she was five years short of retirement age, where she would have qualified for Medicare, retirement benefits and her full package and her health conditions worsened, especially with the stress of not having the income just everything, kind of a cyclical effect, just made things worse on her health. She developed heart problems, and ultimately basically her only access to health care became the emergency room without health coverage and just, you know, by the time she would go to get help, it was that bad.
So it was around that time that she, I think the hospital referred her to the Downtown Women’s Center, and we helped her get Medi-Cal as fast as possible and we helped her find housing. And the last I saw her, she was employed again and doing well but you know, it just really shows the importance of health care, and had that not been disrupted she wouldn’t have experienced homelessness and the system wouldn’t have had the costs that we incur too when people use emergency rooms in a way that isn’t necessary, right, or could have been prevented.
Q: So she had health insurance through her job at LAUSD?
Turk: She did.
Q: And then obviously, when she lost her job she lost her health insurance?
Turk: Right.
Q: Ok. Wow.
Turk: Well, I think one thing though that we’ve done at the Downtown Women’s Center is to try to make it as easy as possible to obtain health care so we actually have a co-located health clinic on-site in our building where people also permanently reside. So we’ve done what we think is necessary to reduce any barriers certainly like transportation or, you know, access so they can just go downstairs and in some cases the doctor can go do home visits, if needed, if someone can’t get out of bed or something for some reason.
Q: What impact would a single-payer system in California or the nation mean for these women that you’ve worked with in particular?
Turk: I mean, hopefully it would be amazing. Just the opportunities would increase and there’d be less stress around a system that’s still particularly complex to navigate but it also hopefully would prevent homelessness — knowing that healthcare bills and healthcare related matters are significant causes of homelessness, that hopefully it would be a prevention.
Q: Wow. Do you know any women that became homeless in part due to health bills or health costs?
Turk: Sure, I’ve met a number of people whose health costs have skyrocketed and there’s just, I mean, it’s awful that someone can’t, you know, get treatment for cancer, and not become homeless or something. It’s just awful and it’s especially impacting older people. It can be difficult to re-enter the workforce, especially after a challenging health condition, and so we come from the perspective that, you know, health care is a prevention of homelessness but also a right for people.
Q: Thank you, Amy.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen to Code WACK! at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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