Air Date: February 21, 2025
Founder and Director of Thai Community Development Center (Thai CDC), Chancee “Chancee” Martorell, is interviewed about the impacts of the the Trump/Musk authoritarian coup in Washington, D.C., ICE raids and ongoing healthcare inequalities faced by the Thai community.
Chancee was born in Thailand and raised in Los Angeles. She studied political science and public law at UCLA where she received both her B.A. and M.A. in Urban Planning with a specialization in Urban Regional Development/Third World Development. She also studied Humanities at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand in 1988.
Engaged in social activism for the past 35 years, Chancee leads Thai CDC, a non-profit organization she founded in 1994 in an effort to improve the lives of Thai immigrants through services that promote cultural adjustment and economic self-sufficiency.
She is known most notably for her work on over a half dozen major human rights cases involving over 2,000 Thai victims of human trafficking who were discovered working in slave conditions here in Southern CA. Her tireless advocacy on behalf of the victims and the success of each case has made her a leading expert and sought-after spokesperson on the serious issue of modern-day slavery.
Thai CDC is a two-time endorser of CalCare!
TRANSCRIPT
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HOST: Good morning. Welcome to Health Care For Us, the show that brings you the latest on health care policy. Exposing how our health insurance system is costly and deadly by design and demonstrates how a single-payer health care reform that eliminates private insurance middlemen would cost less and save lives. Our goal is to inoculate against medical industrial complex propaganda and to inspire you to join the grassroots movement to win a health care system that centers patient care over private corporate profit.
It’s the third Friday of the month, which makes me, Taiji Miyagawa, your host for today’s program. I serve as a co-coordinator for Asians and Pacific Islanders for CalCare, API for CalCare, a single-payer partner of Health Care For Us. Health Care For Us is a non-profit volunteer organization on a mission to guarantee health care as a human right. You can link to information about API for CalCare by going to HC4US.org. Click on “About” and choose “Single-Pair Partners” from the pull-down menu.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on this show are solely those of myself and our show guests. They do not necessarily reflect the views of KPFK or the Pacifica Foundation.
Single-Payer Health Care, sometimes referred to as Medicare-for-All, is simply a streamlined financing mechanism where one entity administers health care funding and payments. People use the term “Medicare-for-All” because single-payer reform would simply expand the currently cost-effective and administratively efficient Medicare program to cover everyone rather than just senior citizens. A true single-payer system will eliminate the ability of private insurance corporations to delay and deny care that our doctors recommend for us and our loved ones. Nearly two dozen independent studies confirm that a single-payer system will eliminate the squandering of billions of public funds now being wasted on unnecessary administrative insurance company bureaucracies. Doctors will be able to focus on patient care rather than fighting to obtain authorization for medical services that they recommend.
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HOST: Today we are extremely honored to have with us the founder and director of the Thai Community Development Center, Chancee Martorell. Chancee was born in Thailand and raised in Los Angeles. She studied political science and public law at UCLA where she received both her BA and MA in urban planning with the specializations in urban regional development and third world development. She also studied humanities at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand in 1988.
Engaged in social activism for the past 35 years, Chancee leads Thai CDC, a non-profit organization she founded in 1994 in an effort to improve the lives of Thai immigrants through services that promote cultural adjustment and economic self-sufficiency. She’s known most notably for her work on over a half dozen major human rights cases involving over 2,000 Thai victims of human trafficking who were discovered working in slave conditions here in Southern California. Her tireless advocacy on behalf of the victims and the success of each case has made her a leading expert and sought-after spokesperson on the serious issue of modern-day slavery. Thai CDC, I’m proud to announce, is a two-time endorser of the two true single-payer bills that have been introduced in California in 2022. It was AB 1400 and as mentioned previously last year was AB 2200.(…)
Welcome to the show, Chancee. How are you?
MARTORELL: Fine. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I feel very honored and privileged to be on the show.
HOST: How’s things been going over at Thai CDC amidst all this madness that’s been going on?
MARTORELL: It has been overwhelming to say the least and we have been unable to to rest or have any respite. Since the wildfires we’ve been rendering aid and relief to vulnerable victims who oftentimes get bypassed because of language barrier or transportation barrier or technology barrier and then of course with the Trump administration taking office it has become just very difficult to work in this atmosphere of fear and terror.
We have people who are just very scared of what could happen to them because half of the people we serve are undocumented. So we’ve been doing Know Your Rights workshop around the clock and passing out these red cards to help people understand their rights and their right to remain silent should ICE agents approach them.
It has been just very, very stressful on our community and our staff is also feeling the vicarious trauma coming from from this reign of terror I would call it.
HOST: California is supposed to be a sanctuary state. LA is supposed to be a sanctuary city.
MARTORELL: We still are.
HOST: How do you see that in terms of the benefits of having that declaration as well as the shortcomings in terms of how it’s enforced as a sanctuary city? Do you have any assessment about that?
MARTORELL: Well yeah, fortunately we are in a sanctuary state, county and city and there’s some measure of protection there because you have government departments and agencies unwilling to cooperate with immigration enforcement and law enforcement of these municipalities here in the state and also in the county and city also not willing to cooperate with ICE enforcement and not turning people over to ICE and not turning over any kind of information to ICE. So there’s a measure of protection there and of course the Trump administration is threatening to withhold federal funding to these municipalities and the whole state and the county and what have you but Governor Newsom had just gotten millions of dollars appropriated to come to defense of the undocumented.
So we have government that’s at least sensitive to the undocumented. We have the immigrant rights are Los Angeles coalition that we’re part of in the county of LA that is trying to prioritize the county budget on the needs of immigrants because they make up the backbone of the county’s economy.
And then we have a city council that’s also trying to protect and defend immigrants and you have Attorney General of State of California Attorney General Bonta who’s going to follow every lawsuit imaginable against this administration to protect immigrants and the most vulnerable of all as well.
HOST: Do you feel like, uh, there’s enough support existing with specifically with respect to the Thai community and some of the Asian community, undocumented communities?
MARTORELL: You know there needs to be more awareness that while over 70% I think close to 80% of the undocumented in LA are Latino immigrants about 16% are Asian immigrants and so there needs to be more awareness that there is a segment of the Asian immigrant population that’s undocumented and that is at risk of being rounded up and deported. And so we work together as part of AAPI equity alliance with all these other AAPI non-profit social service providers to really educate the media more than anything.
You know we’re all aware in all of our different social justice, immigrant rights, civil rights, legal aid organizations, all of those partners have that understanding across the board but I think the media really does not understand that there are vulnerable populations in the AAPI community and have not, you know, LA Times just published an article this weekend that finally brought that to the reader’s attention that AAPI communities are also going to be affected once…I believe the plan is for ICE to start coming into LA. I mean they had already come into LA not too long ago but coming in with like force, like shock and awe, starting February 20th, right?
And so we need to be prepared and we need to make sure that everyone’s aware that the AAPI communities will also be targeted not just the Latino community and we all need to band together both the Latino and AAPI communities. We need to really band together and really put up a fight and defend the vulnerable in our community and I’ve been seeing that. You know we’re crossing and transcending racial and ethnic lines because it’s all, you know, about uniting around a common purpose and that is to defend the vulnerable members of our community and to really ensure that that this kind of travesty not occur where individuals are not treated as human beings, you know, because no human being is illegal and that we are given and accorded, everyone’s accorded their due process and are not being terrorized and families are not being torn apart and children are able to go to school and families are able to go to work and earn their living and continue to be the backbone of this economy and that and people are able to go to the hospital and are able to come forward to report a crime.
So you know what you’re going to essentially get is like a class of people driven further underground and in a total state of fear.
HOST: With all of this, knowing all of this, how about sharing how it probably wasn’t a difficult decision to make to endorse the CalCare efforts?
MARTORELL: Oh, not at all. Not at all. We definitely need a single-payer system for healthcare.
If everyone, you know, is able to access healthcare, it should be a universal healthcare system. We are the wealthiest industrialized country in the world and yet we cannot provide healthcare for, you know, the whole country and like other Western industrialized countries. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
Yeah. And I think it’s because the healthcare industry has been hijacked and became, you know, a for-profit industry where CEOs are making gobs of money in the millions and millions of dollars who are not medical professionals and doctors have no say in your care at all, but these CEOs do. And yeah, it’s just been privatized and meant for profit, not for people. And as a community organization that serves people who are medically indigent and cannot access healthcare, it just behooves us to support a single-payer system.
HOST: What are some of the top healthcare needs, you know, disparities, as you will, faced by the Thai community? You mentioned, of course, language barriers, but are there particular medical conditions that would be addressed by having a free healthcare system available to the Thai (community)?
MARTORELL: No, absolutely. We have done a study on the state of health of Thai immigrants and it was called, it was our quote unquote white paper, and it was called “Healthcare on the Margins, the Precarious State of Health for Thai Immigrants.” And we found that 69% are medically indigent or without health insurance. And we found that the second leading cause of death was peptic ulcer, which no one should die from, because unfortunately, it’s compounded by a lot of chronic diseases that go untreated because they don’t know where to go for treatment and they can’t afford treatment.
And we found that the leading chronic diseases that Thai immigrants, who, you know, are low incomes, suffer from diabetes and from high cholesterol and from hypertension. And so, yeah, so these are the chronic illnesses that we found and we have found that they are not only unable to access healthcare because of language barrier, but because they have no access to sometimes like fresh produce. So there’s like food insecurity that’s compounding that as well. And then there’s the stress and tension associated with the acculturation process that really leaves no room for them to attend to their own individual personal health or the health of their family, because they’re always trying to eke out of survival and spend 24 seven working to put food on the table, because these are low wage workers, a lot of them, the people we serve and making time for healthcare is a luxury.
There’s no time to go to the dentist, to go get your physical, to… So what ends up happening is they only see a doctor in a case of emergencies. Like you have to be like nearly bleeding to death before you go to the doctor and then you end up in the emergency room or urgent care. And if you don’t have insurance, that’s going to be a huge bill that you can’t even pay. So they try to avoid it at all costs, because they know it’s going to cost them if they have no health insurance.
And of course, we work very closely with these low-cost nonprofit health clinics, like Asian Pacific Healthcare Venture. And a lot of Thais are able to get help with enrollment to Medi-Cal and be able to get some healthcare there, like clinical care. But when it comes to emergency, that’s harder when it comes to real life and death or serious, like if someone suffers a stroke and needs to be hospitalized or someone ends up having to go to the ICU. So that’s why we make prevention, education prevention, really important. And that’s why we do health fairs. We have another health fair coming up on March 1st at the Thai Temple.
HOST: Yeah, that’s great. I kind of mentioned before, we’ve had a Democratic super majority in California. AB 1400 and AB 2200 were actually the two, I said, true single payer bills in California, because they were the first ones that closed that loophole that allowed for the insurance companies to still have their grubby hands on the public funds. And we got killed in committee both times, basically. And I don’t want to get you in trouble. But do you have any thoughts about how we could somehow strengthen support for the legislators that are truly behind Cal Care, you know, so they feel safe to continue standing behind it and try to see if we can make more progress down the road. Do you have any thoughts about that?
MARTORELL: You know, if you surveyed Americans in the US, you know, they majority want universal health care. Okay? It’s just that it’s just that you also have the lobbying power of the health care industry, who spend millions of dollars lobbying, you know, these public office holders. And so, you know, until you get like money out of politics, you just going to have a hard time.
You know, so we, but there’s people power, and we need to be able to, you know, some, to bring people together to really fight because…and, and, and you can also, you know, make the Democrats realize that that maybe this two party system is not working, you know, maybe we need yet another party. Right? People got to get behind that, that notion that a duopoly is not working. It’s like good cop bad cop, the Democrats. I don’t know how they’re going to survive if they’re not, if they’re not paying attention.
HOST: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people that they lost through this last stretch with, of course, the genocide in Palestine, I think a lot of people, they’re not going to come back.
MARTORELL: Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, so so we but I think people, I still believe in people power. I still believe in, like grassroots organizing, I still believe in mobilization. I still believe of people and and and getting people out there to make waves and to like, you know, fight the power and do whatever it takes to resist and to, to show that we take a stand, we’re not going to stand for anything that’s going to hurt, you know, the working class, the working poor, and, and that’s going to, yeah, fundamentally, like transfer, you know, wealth from below to, you know, people above. And, and that’s what what’s happening.
So, so yeah, I just really, we just need to organize. It’s about organizing. That’s what it comes down to.
HOST: Time to get our hands dirty in the in the work.
MARTORELL: Yes, roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and get in the trenches. That’s what’s going to take – its people power. There’s power.
HOST: Yeah, absolutely.
MARTORELL: …in the people, and people seem to discount that.
HOST: Chancee, thanks a lot for joining us today, all of your knowledge, expertise and for all the tremendous work that you’re doing with Thai CDC out there in the communities. Really appreciate you. Thank you very much for joining.
MARTORELL: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
HOST: We’ll talk soon. I’d love to get a hold of that white paper that you’re referencing.
MARTORELL: Well, sure. I could send that to you.
HOST: We can republish that on the website and things.
MARTORELL: Absolutely. Sure. I’ll send that to you right now.
HOST: And make sure to let us know if there’s like, different volunteer opportunities will help promote the health fair, things like that.
MARTORELL: Yes, March 1st. I tell them your social accounts.
HOST: So I presume we’ll see stuff there too.
MARTORELL: Great, great.
HOST: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Martorell: Bye. Thank you.
HOST: Bye Bye.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The queer community and allies in LA are coming together every Thursday to protest the decision of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to comply with the Trump administration’s order to ban gender-affirming care for people aged 19 and younger. The community is calling upon all to stand up to defend the human rights of transgender youth. Next Thursday at 4.30 pm at Sunset Boulevard in Edgemont. Then march to the Children’s Hospital at 5 pm at 4560 Sunset Boulevard.
Stop ethnic cleansing. Private U.S. security forces have been seen in Gaza on the heels of Trump’s calls to empty all Palestinians from Gaza and rebuild it under a U.S. takeover. Rallies are being held in Los Angeles at the Israeli consulate at 11766 Wilshire Boulevard between Granville and Stoner. On Tuesdays from 10am to 2pm, Wednesdays from 10am to noon, and Fridays from 4.30pm to 6pm.
Make sure to check out our website HC4US.org for health care related news, articles, a calendar for actions and events, and incredible resources to help build a movement to win health care for the people, not the profits of private insurance corporations. Please follow us on all the socials at hc4us_org.
Thank you to our guest, Chantilly, Mark Durell, Smiley T, and the Tall Trees for our theme song, and the entire Health Care for Us team that makes this show possible. Health Care for Us airs every Friday at 7.30am. Next week, tune in to hear from your host, Jackie Hernandez.
Stay tuned for Democracy Now! And remember, single payer is the solution. Join the health care revolution!
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