GLENDALE — Yolanda Aranda and her husband have been going to the county’s Glendale Health Center clinic for four years to get free screenings.
Aranda’s husband was recently laid off after working 15 years with a company. The sudden layoff, Aranda said, has left them without health insurance. She and her husband have diabetes.
“We have to go all the way to Tijuana to get our medicine,” she said. “But since he is not working, we can’t go over all the time to get treated.”
Aranda spoke at a rally Tuesday in front of the clinic on the 500 block of North Glendale Avenue about the need for a public health-care option for uninsured people. Glendale’s rally, which attracted more than a dozen supporters, was one of five throughout the Los Angeles region Tuesday, organizers said.
Organizers said they hoped rally participants would call their local lawmakers and urge them to support a public health-care plan to help the uninsured. Their goal was to get at least 100,000 calls into local congressmen and women.
“We are going to make telephone calls, and really our message to our folks in Congress is that we can’t wait any longer,” physician Michael Jolley said. “Each day that passes, we have people who are suffering more and more because they aren’t able to receive the prevention or the treatment for many other diseases.”
After the rally, organizers passed out fliers and helped patients make phone calls to their local elected officials.
People who have health-care plans they are comfortable with would be able to keep them under President Obama’s proposal, Jolley said.
Obama tried to persuade the American public to embrace his health-care-reform bill by holding town hall meetings and encouraging lawmakers to host similar gatherings in their own jurisdictions.
But the complex bill has stalled as Republicans and Democrats debate costs and levels of insurance coverage.
Jolley said he recently treated a single mother for breast cancer that had spread to her spine.
She was a school bus driver who couldn’t afford her health-care premiums, so she didn’t go for regular exams.
The mother went to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center seeking treatment for back pain caused by a fall, but X-rays later showed she had advanced cancer.
The spread of her cancer could have been avoided if she would have caught and treated her breast cancer in its early stages, Jolley said.
“She really has no other options at this time,” he said.
Registered nurse Kyoung Bak helps treat thousands of immigrants and seniors who go to the Glendale Health Center.
Many clients return yearly “because we build a long-lasting relationship with our patients that come here,” she said.
She feared that a county proposal to privatize the clinic would leave many returning patients without a place to get medical care.
“Instead of spending time and money privatizing our services, we should direct our energy on making sure the thousands of uninsured families in our community have access to operable health care,” Bak said.
