"My Hope is That My Community Has Access to Quality Health Care" - MaiKa Yang, Stone Soup

Throughout the Ensuring Our Healthy Future Campaign, we will highlight each of our partners and their hopes for their community and the Affordable Care Act on our blog. SEARAC's community organizer, Nenick Vu, interviewed Stone Soup's executive director, MaiKa Yang, for our first post.

Organizational Profile:

• Stone Soup Fresno
• Location: Fresno, CA
• Website: http://www.stonesoupfresno.org/
• Serving the community for 18 years
• Services: Citizenship classes, parent engagement programs, youth leadership development
• MaiKa Yang, Executive Director

Interview:

NV: What is your hope for your community with regard to the Affordable Care Act?

MY: One of the big issues for our clients is access to quality health care. My hope is that our community is able to have access to choices for quality health care to meet their needs. Health care needs to be culturally relevant.  Providers should have alternative approaches to healing and health, in order to be respectful to our communities. And of course, quality is really about interpreters and additional resources that would be provided for them.

For many of the families and elders that we work with, they’re not quite sure what preventative care is or even who provides that kind of care. Not a lot of the families or constituents we serve know much about or practice preventative care. They lack experience with western style health care systems. As folks who lived in the hills of Laos, they were never exposed to preventative care, or even hospitals and clinics until they arrived in the refugee camps. Beyond that, it’s not just the refugees either, even the children of refugees face these same issues. The lack of awareness of preventative care is passed on to younger generations.

NV: What are some solutions to increasing preventative care in the community?

MY: There has to be education around the importance of preventative care. To give answers as to what preventative care is, and why it is important to consumers, especially elders and children. Beyond that though, it’s important for healthcare consumers to also know how to select the best health care providers, or at least those who provide culturally competent care and who accommodate for culture and traditions. I think it has to be a system-wide effort to provide information to the public. It’s not like they can come to Stone Soup for one day and learn it all at one time. We should be using all systems, including media, to articulate the right health care information and education to people.

NV: Can you name one example of an institution that should be actively promoting preventative health care?

MY: Well, for example, if families in our communities are being visited by case workers for public benefits, the case workers should be providing health care information to them too. Or maybe our county health department needs to take a stand and make information available. Also, the main health insurance carriers need to have culturally competent staff who can make that information about preventative care available to customers.

Another issue is affordability. For community members who don’t have access to health care insurance or public benefits, they simply don’t have options.

NV: Do you know of any specific cases?

MY: There are many different stories. For example, there are some who need specialized treatment that their provider does not cover. This almost always affects young people who are almost out of college or who work at places that don’t provide health care benefits. Even at Stone Soup, we can’t afford to pay health care benefits for some of our part time staff. Even for those who have health insurance, they have to pay high premiums or co-payments. Another group includes those who come to this country on visas, and end up needing health care. For example, we had a woman who was here on a visa and she needed to be hospitalized and couldn’t pay for it. She wasn’t eligible for MediCal or any publically supplemented health care. Her visa had expired and she couldn't pay off her bills.

I hear other stories when I talk with our seniors. Several of them are taking care of their grandchildren who have disabilities or health issues and are currently receiving SSI [Supplemental Security Income]. However SSI sometimes doesn’t pay for all the medication for their grandchildren. So it ends up falling on the elders to buy the medication for hundreds of dollars a month.

MY: Our Southeast Asian American community is not homogenous.  We’re part of the Asian and Pacific Islander community but we do have our unique and distinct health experiences and issues. There are up and coming health issues that are impacting our community that we don’t know about yet. One of the priorities for the campaign is data collection, because there needs to be more information about the diseases that are impacting our community, like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cancer. The more we know about how these diseases are affecting our communities, the better we can address those issues.