By Silvia Casabianca
VOXXI News, June 18, 2012
An Argentinean medical doctor, Claudia Chaufan arrived in California as a single mom of a 7-year-old in 1997. She had been accepted to a one-year postgraduate training in science and medical communication. Destiny had it that she’d fall in love with a man that eventually became her husband, and with a cause that is now her passion.
She changed plans and stayed in the United States to get a doctorate in sociology at the University of California in Santa Cruz and now works as an assistant professor of sociology and health policy at the Institute for Health and Aging of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California in San Francisco.
Chaufan gives presentations on diabetes and on comparative health policies, and writes for the general public and for expert audiences in the United States and abroad. She is also active in professional and community organizations, among them the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).
Experiencing a single-payer health care system
Chaufan just returned from teaching a one-term course on Comparative Health Care Systems at the Taipei Medical University in Taiwan. There she got to experience first hand what she preaches about every day – that single-payer health care systems might be the best option.
“We had just arrived in Taiwan and my husband had this extremely bad headache,” Chaufan recalls. “I thought he had a ruptured brain aneurysm. The next day the headache was still there. I didn’t know what to do. We were staying next door to the hospital where I was teaching. We walked into the emergency room and I said we needed a doctor who could rule out the possibility of such and such.”
After a wait of only 20 minutes a doctor came. He agreed that an aneurysm was a possibility and ordered a CAT scan right away.
Fortunately the results were negative.
“The whole ordeal took us barely 90 minutes,” said Chaufan who was ready to pay in cash whatever the cost of the services were. Even though she knew the system really well, she had never experienced it by herself and she was surprised when she got the bill.
“I was thinking to myself, a CAT scan costs thousands in the United States. They asked us for our insurance card and we said we didn’t have one. They charged us $205. Two doctors had seen my husband, plus the stay at the hospital, and all they had asked us for was a name and an address!”
The medical system is simply not there for Hispanics
Before setting her residence in California, Chaufan’s medical practice had focused on clinical diabetes. She had attended medical conferences in the United States and briefly visited public hospitals.
Since in Argentina the health care system is underfunded, when compared, the hospitals in the U.S. looked great, clean and spacious to Chaufan.
“I thought they were wonderful,” Chaufan said. “I had seen unequal access to care in my country and thought the system here was great.”
But then she started to hear stories from people.
An NGO hired her to do diabetes education with Latino communities and she found that immigrants – documented or undocumented – had basically no access to health care.
“I felt embarrassed to talk to these people. How do you tell them to go eat broccoli when they could hardly make ends meet? Economy has not been working for them. It’s not the crisis. They live in a recession forever! They can’t even pay for transportation [to go to the doctor], and if they have a car, it’s falling apart.”
Chaufan decided to quit this job.
“I realized the problem was not education, it was poverty,” Chaufan said. “The medical system was simply not there. These people needed strips to test their blood sugar, they needed medication!”
Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not the way out
Chaufan started to rethink the health care system in the United States. She saw the problems and wanted to participate in solutions but didn’t know how until she found the PNHP.
“ACA doesn’t grant equal access to health – it excludes undocumented immigrants, who would not be allowed to buy insurance even with their own money,” said Chaufman. “People need to know that Latinos are the worst-served, and will be the worst affected by the reform.”
“If ACA is overturned, in whole or in part, I predict that the ‘liberal’ media is only going to talk about the role of the ‘bad Republican’ opposition, and ignore that 50 PNHP doctors (myself included) presented an Amicus Brief that also challenges the constitutionality of ACA,” she added. “And we did not do it because we are pushing for an imaginary free health care market, but because we wanted to make the point that you can bring universal affordable care to all Americans with a publicly financed health care system.
“They won’t mention that, because it is not in their interest. Everybody, Democrats, Republicans and the media are in bed with insurance companies and Big Pharma.”
Chaufan believes the ACA would institutionalize the worst of the current health care system.
“It makes people buy their junk. Even if it were universal insurance, as it is presented, with 26 million that will not be covered – according to a 2019 estimate – it’s underinsurance.”
The Argentinean health care system is underfunded and not strong, Chaufan said, but there exists a public hospital network where everybody can go.
“As a medical student, I went to one of those hospitals for services. Everyone who walks in gets care,” she said. “Non-profit mutual funds created by unions offer services to the community. There are also prepaid medical services, not cheap but never the horror that I see here with the price for tests, seeing a doctor, pharmaceuticals.”
The Affordable Care Act won’t eliminate financial barriers, she affirmed.
“Every country has a standard, including Taiwan,” Chaufan said. “If it’s publicly financed, the government says, you put a certain percentage of your salary, we buy services in bulk, buy for the whole country or the whole province, like in Canada. Here, we don’t know – it all depends on the individual insurance … that, the administration will not change.”
http://voxxi.com/dr-claudia-chaufman-hispanics-worst-served-affordable-care-act/