Health vs Wealth

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I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

I am a mother of two public school children now in college.

I am a small business owner for the last, I guess, 30 years now.

I have an employment agency that specializes in staffing trade shows.

That's my day job.

Wait, see, what?

I love trade shows.

Do you know that I spent the first 10 years owning this business, having to tell people what a trade show was?

Comic-Con changed all of that.

This is Gina Viola, who ran for mayor a few years ago and lost, perhaps because of her lofty goals, which include single-payer health care.

My first question, tell me why someone does that.

Oof, well,

in the beginning, were you the president of your eighth grade class?

Like what?

Okay, so my aunt says, I never had a Facebook until I was running for mayor in 2022.

So it was my one concession I made is now there's a Gina Viola on Facebook.

I know.

But my aunt went on to the Facebook page and said, oh, this is perfect.

Gina was mayor of the playground.

She was always mayor.

I was like, that is so funny.

I'm a really reluctant leader.

Like I love to go and be a participant.

I love to do the heavy lifting.

And lo and behold, I always end up in that leadership space.

A reluctant leader, but also like a type A controlling type.

I don't want to spend all day figuring out where six chairs go.

That's the biggest, that's the biggest complaint people would have working with me is they're like, you're not letting anybody else do anything.

And I'm like, I just want to get it done so we can do the thing.

Well, does that interrupt your life anywhere else?

Like, I have that problem where I'm like, well, I'll just do it better and faster.

So.

I mean, I've gotten a lot better at it in the last 10 years.

But you've been doing it.

You know,

well, and I also worked with an organizer, Tristan, on

Measure R campaign.

And they specifically said, if you're doing anything alone, you're doing it wrong.

And I was like, that's such good advice because I would often go early just to do a bunch of it alone.

Tell me about Measure R.

Long live Measure R.

Measure R was a county campaign back in 2020 to stop the jail expansion here in Los Angeles.

But yeah, the county had slated $3.5 billion to build two new jails.

One county?

LA County, this county.

So Patrice Colors, Justice LA, a bunch of other orgs got together and wrote this bill that said, absolutely not.

What you need to do is put some money into a study on how alternatives to incarceration.

would be beneficial regard you know rather than building two new jails and we had a second part to our bill subpoena power for the civilian oversight commission of the sheriff it was so interesting because i went door to door for months and months and months because basically what we were tasked with at white people for black lives was bringing in the white vote because this is a measure that most white folks don't think concerned them at all what we did was we shared stories of harm at the door with one another We tried to share jail stories, but a lot of white people don't even know they have jail stories.

Like, I can't tell you, I would knock on a door and I'd say, do you know anyone who's been to jail?

And they would say no so I would start sharing my story of somebody I knew who'd been to jail and then they'd be like oh wait my nephew went to jail or wait I went to jail or you know I myself

actually I'm on parole right now and I forgot 80% of them No, they have no one that they know has been to jail.

So then we would switch to harm stories.

Do you know, you know, have you ever been harmed or have you ever struggled and received the care and help you needed to get past things?

And those stories often involved when I would ask people about their harm, it was always about property.

Yes, one time my car got stolen.

It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

What?

And I'm like, that's nice.

Lucky you.

Yeah, seriously.

No, lucky you.

I mean,

the doors that were the most interesting were the ones that had no jail or no harm stories and would double down even after I told both of mine, like at length.

What are yours?

My mother went to jail.

She pulled a gun on her then second husband because she was in the middle of a mental health crisis.

And he was scary.

No, he's a great guy.

She's a little scary.

No, she's not.

She's very paranoid and damaged and has never received the care she should have.

They threw her in a jail cell and left her there for 10 days in this cell with no services until my brother went up and advocated for her release.

So the story is so

unreal and complicated and such an indictment of how racist our system is because A, she was left there because she was white, right?

Like they didn't further move her, but take steps to move her to prison, even have a hearing for her.

But she was left in this cell with no services, which is exactly what she was having a paranoid fit about.

She was convinced someone was coming to take her child.

It solidified for her that she's been right all along, that everyone's against her.

Yeah, my brother got up there and advocated for her.

And I mean, she was released to him with nothing.

No hearing, no trial, no further

dealings with the system at all, simply because my brother went up.

And, you know, so again, had she been a different color, there's no way that would have gone down that way.

So I, after I ran for mayor, I was thinking, okay, I need to, you know, 45,000 people voted for us, 7%.

We knocked out a city council person, a city attorney.

I felt

I ran as no party.

Oh, okay.

But these are all Democrats because, you know, to run for mayor of Los Angeles, you become a fake Democrat like Rick Crusoe did.

So it's funny, the Democratic clubs would have me on to do endorsements and I'd be like, you guys know I'm not a Democrat, right?

And they're like, oh.

But I was thinking I need to do something meaningful with this small platform.

So I decided I would do health care because single-payer health care, more often than not, when I would look at solutions to problems that we have in this city, single-payer healthcare ticks a lot of boxes.

Even if you talk about our unhoused, which is the biggest crisis that we have, right?

Seven people a day dying on the streets of Los Angeles, most of them black, right?

Even though black folks represent about, I think, less than 6% of the population at this point.

Think about seeing somebody struggling on the streets and being able to take them to any clinic and them getting some help.

Like that is, it almost sounds like a fairy tale.

It's a dream come true.

That is single-payer health care.

You, me, the governor, every single person in this state has the exact same plan, period.

That is single-payer health care, which means you know it's going to be good because Gavin Newsom wants good health care.

Sure.

All the California legislator want good health care.

All of the people in government want good health care.

And so when these folks are all in the same buckets we are, you know, the specialty clinics would be truly what they're for, right?

Like if you have women's clinics, yeah, it would be for women.

Right now what they're for are private equity firms.

They're for

health insurance companies, right, to make money with off of the government dollars.

Like this private equity piece, even the health insurance industry scam, scam,

is a mechanism by which public dollars are funneled into private companies.

And it is, it's atrocious.

I see it.

I saw it in housing first, and I see it in healthcare now.

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So I joined Healthcare for Us, an all-volunteer organization that is fully committed to the passage of a single-payer health care bill here in California.

Of course, we do support efforts at the federal level for Medicare for All as well, but our sole primary focus is here in California for the state bill.

What was astounding to me, the biggest thing that was astounding to me at first was like how many people have stopped seeking care

because it's even people with insurance because it's so complicated.

And expensive, even if you have insurance.

Yeah.

So this, this had me digging for like answers about that.

And I kept coming up with this private equity piece, this private equity piece.

Private equity, you know, it's another entity coming into our healthcare that is purely for profit.

And when you're looking at our health care from a standpoint of profit, we lose.

We lose.

Yeah.

Because the only way they make money is to delay, deny, and let us die.

And that is exactly what happens.

So to get into the nitty-gritty, what I was looking at specifically were these nonprofit hospitals that they were buying in large quantities, private equity groups were buying.

And I found that you had to keep them nonprofit for five years.

So, but five years in a day,

no longer.

So, they would immediately sell the brick and mortar hospitals, untold dollars of profits to their shareholders, and then make the hospitals lease them back.

This is legal.

Private equity got in for two reasons.

One, it's trillions and trillions of dollars being made by the health insurance industry, right?

And then also, the health insurance industry saw that its days were probably going to be numbered at some point because it's just things are collapsing in on themselves and they've they've squeezed with their greed every last penny out of us.

There just isn't any money left, which is why they've gotten into Medicaid, why they've gotten into Medicare Advantage, because they want those government dollars too.

They've squeezed everything they could out of the private sector and now they're going for the government dollars as well.

Folks smarter than me sitting up at the top realize that's going to come to an end.

It's going to have a breaking point, much like the housing bubble burst.

There's going to be a medical bubble that will burst.

Like that's where we are with our medical care these days.

Like it's, it really has degraded.

So many people I know are seeking alternative sources.

You know, a friend I know hurt her finger, punctured her finger.

She was bleeding out in an Xer clinic and said, I need stitches.

Like you need to help me.

She was bleeding out in their lobby.

And they were, they said, what's your Medi-Cal number?

She didn't know her Medi-Cal number.

So her friend took her to CVS across the street because she had the smarts to say, let's go get your Medi-Cal number from CVS.

Got the Medi-Cal number, went back to the XR clinic.

The XR clinic still said, oh, it looks like you didn't quite finish your picking your plan, picking your group.

So we can't help you.

Just give me some look with the skin she died.

She drove 30 miles with her finger bloody to an OBGYN friend who then sewed up her finger, even though she normally sews hoo-has.

So, you know, everybody, but that was the solution because there was no care going.

And that's, that's where we're headed.

That's when I'm talking about the bubble bursting.

You know, what you're seeing with private equity is coming in and buying what they can.

And now, unfortunately, private equity can borrow against, like, let's say they go in and buy a bunch of clinics with brick and mortar.

They can borrow against that on day one and pay out the shareholders on day one.

They don't even have to wait that time anymore.

So there's an end date to that.

That game is going to break.

So when I'm saying the health insurance industry saw this coming, you know, those executives are also on the boards of many private equity firms, right?

And let's face it, BlackRock not only owns most of our housing stock, now they're going to own most of our health care too.

Yeah.

So buying out, and then what's happening for physicians, I mean, this is terrible for physicians because physicians historically worked for hospitals or worked for groups, you know, and they had a certain amount of ability to actually be able to care for patients.

Now they're all working for these private equity firms.

And again, the motive is profit fast now, now, now.

The only way to get that is to see more patients, spend less time with patients, and do more administration.

And cut costs in ways that hurt people.

Which, as you know, from the nursing home stuff that you researched, because that was was our first like, we should have paid attention when that started happening, when we started seeing what folks were being paid inside the nursing homes once they got bought by private equity.

The folks they'd even hire, gone are the union workers on that.

Gone are the nurses.

Like these are regular people getting minimum wage, if that, to do a high level of care.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about when you're talking about someone going in to get their finger sewn up.

The person at the front desk is always the one taking the heat on this shit, but like,

like they're a heightened sense of fear all the time that similar to the three people in the lobby, you know, like, yeah, I have to follow these rules or this private equity company that pays me shit is going to kick me out.

It's, I think the health insurance, the health care industry as a whole is under a huge demoralization.

Like there's people are not happy.

Nurses are not happy.

Administrators are not happy.

Doctors are not happy.

There's a doctor in Chicago, Dr.

Eric Reinhart, who is trying to unionize physicians, right?

Because this is like this, he sees this as the only hope to being able to fight back against these parameters being set by, frankly, robber barons of the insurance industry and now the private equity industry.

When you look at

Aetna's decision to buy CVS, to me, that was them seeing, okay, we may not always be Aetna, but we'll always be CVS, right?

What do you mean by that?

Like when the dam bursts on the insurance industry scam, because you know, I have to keep hoping, otherwise I'm going to fall into despair, that we will have Medicare for all and the insurance industry will go away.

Folks know that.

Folks know what that date is.

The folks at the top know what that date is because the care is eroding and people are just not going anymore.

I mean, it's people are just dying.

People are dying.

People are not having,

people are choosing not to buy insurance anymore.

People are, you know, frustrated.

They've made Medicaid, and which is Medi-Cal in California, so complicated that if you don't stay on top of it, people are just like, whatever.

It's wild to think that that's where we are in the wealthiest state, in the wealthiest county, in the wealthiest city that this country and this world has ever known.

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Okay, so we had a bill, AB 2200, last year, California legislator, for single-payer health care for California.

Everybody in the Democratic Party, and we have a supermajority in the Democratic Party, you know, will put on their website, will say out loud and proud, they are strong supporters of single-payer healthcare, right?

Buffy Wicks, she is a legislator up in Northern California in Oakland, did a whole, I don't know what it was, podcast, something with AD Barkin, who died recently of,

he started Be a Hero.

He was advocating for Medicare for all for, you know, nationwide, but before, and he used his own illness to like make a lot of comparisons about why, how horrible our healthcare system is.

And so he did a whole thing with Buffy Wicks.

She's in California.

She's a California representative.

She actually killed the AB 2200 bill, even though outwardly she's with A.D.

Barkin saying, I'll go to my grave to get us single-payer health care.

Like this level of betrayal that we see

speaks to your point.

Like who, you know, Gavin Newsom ran on single-payer health care.

ran on it.

And when he wasn't recalled, like part of the reason some of us got in and fought for him to not be recalled, I remember Francesca Fiorentini specifically telling me this.

Like she worked hard to have him not to be recalled.

And one of the reasons was because of his stance on single-payer health care.

He's the reason we don't have it.

He is the reason.

Tell me what you think his thinking is though.

And how do you think that's the best thing?

His best friend is the executive, is the president of Blue Shield.

Like the, in real life, like that is truly his bestie.

is either the VP or president of Blue Shield.

So what's so dumb about us that we didn't see that before he ran?

We see it, but we think we can out it publicly and hold him to something bigger because he wants to run for something bigger.

In fact, when we shouted him down at the KDEM convention in 2024, I guess it was.

What are we?

No, 23.

Eric and I went and unfurled a CalCare Now banner.

There's a whole group of activists, patients had a patient, stood up on chairs and chanted CalCare Now

in front of him, so much so that he was the only one of that whole convention that couldn't use his speech for for rebroadcasting like everybody else did yes it was damn i wish we would have done that at the we need to do it all the time i know we need to do it all the time

this is the thing we need to do it all the time we shouldn't have to rely on luigi to kill all the ceos to get this kind of attention like that's where

the feet to the fire needs to be.

But, you know, more importantly, I mean, to your point, like, I mean, we need a quick left turn at this point.

It's not even a gradual left turn.

I think it's not good.

I think it's good in small pockets, hyper-locally.

Sure.

When things are hyper-localized and you have a city like Denver, let's take Denver, that's committed to unarmed crisis response, that's committed to a housing-first approach on getting people off the streets and into housing.

You know, when you have hyper-local municipalities that do care about people's basic rights, as a nation, nation, when has it been good?

Never.

Our birth defect is terrible.

We were born on tyranny and terror.

Right.

Like,

so never, I'm going to say to you, never.

Like, when they say make America great again, I am like,

what does that even mean?

You know,

it's, they mean make America white again, is what they mean.

And back to the norms.

And they're going to use respectability politics and decorum.

Like, that's going to kill us all.

Tell me more about that.

So respectability politics is, so I'm in a room of activists that are tired of this and have been advocating for a single payer for 30 years.

And they're like, we need to do more.

So that's why one of the members of our board like formed Patients at a Patients

and

we had patient gowns on at the K-DEM convention.

Like we were taking it to that level.

But even that being said,

there's still an amount of, but we got to do it within what's reasonable.

We got to not make the nurses uncomfortable.

We got to not, and there's such a stronghold on us in this manner.

In fact, I was just reading an article from somebody who was, they had me, I mean, they were really talking about what we needed to do to like really firm up a general strike day

and a working families party and all that.

But then right up at the end, they're like, you know, and be respectful when you go to city council.

And I'm like, oh,

out, I'm out.

Because the minute, you know, the respectability politics piece comes in.

I will say my one, when I was running for mayor,

I had a moment in a debate where I chose not to bring something up.

Ooh.

Yeah.

Bring it up.

Very, very quickly.

You decided that very quickly.

Yeah, I decided it very quickly.

So it was, it was against Kevin DeLeon and Karen Bass.

It was the three of us.

And I was hammering him about his sweeps in his district.

So our unhoused people are often met with what's called sweeps.

So our city's solution for homelessness is police and sanitation, which is why the public at large now view unhoused people as criminal trash.

So the sweep will come with sanitation to tell you, get lost, and they throw away all of your belongings.

Just up in Vallejo last week, they killed a man.

People were saying there's a man asleep in this tent.

And they let the bulldozer in and the bulldozer ran over.

Yes.

Yes.

But on the tip of my tongue was mentioning the man who had died during one of his sweeps in Little Tokyo.

And I held back.

Thankfully, my co-chair at HC4S, Erica, afterwards, you know, and she, she knows me so well and she gave me feedback because she was an actress.

So she was like trying to help me present better.

And she said, that's your first step to political betrayal.

Whoa.

She said, you, yeah.

Did you start crying immediately?

I mean, I have chills even repeating it.

I'm here feeling it myself.

People often ask me, wow, you've sent all these folks to city council.

Didn't you vet them?

The system corrupts.

The minute you get there, you're complicit because you are immediately making deals.

So this is something we had considered doing a season of the dream on like who becomes a politician, where we started this conversation, right?

Like what got you into politics.

And there's been a bunch of research about how politicians, for the most part, they feel so strongly about something that they're willing to put themselves in the line of fire

or follow the rules so straight.

Like, it's, it's, you, the expression is: run to win, lead to lose.

If you really are going to do anything in this system worth anything, go in and do it in one term.

Because if all you care about is getting re-elected or your next seat, it's over.

So, find the thing that you're passionate about.

Lock in.

Like, if it's going to police commission to tell the police to stop killing black people every week, and that's the thing you do, or if it's, you know, other things you can do to, and in terms of health care, join healthcare for us.

You know, join our organization because we are committed to doing, to being more militant in getting what we want.

We're not going to just have legislative visits.

We're not, you know, we're going to, even if it means we have to mutual our way, aid our way into that care.

Sure.

That's what we're going to do.

Hashtag Free Luigi.

Free Luigi.

That's it for this week.

We have a tip line open.

Call us at 323-248-1488.

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And leave us a message about anything that you think is funky funky out there.

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Talk to me.

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