Undocumented, Uninsured, and $200,000 In Medical Debt

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http://www.alternet.org/undocumented-uninsured-and-200000-medical-debt



“I felt she was going to die”

How much does it cost to live? $200,000. That’s what Jorge Toledano discovered when he opened his mother’s hospital bill.

“My mother was having convulsions,” said Toledano. “We (still) don’t know exactly what happened. My sister found her chocking in her sleep, and tried giving her mouth-to-mouth. I knew it was bad, because she was twitching, her voice was gone, and she couldn’t even speak. When I sat her up she vomited, and from there I called my grandmother and told her that my mother was in bad shape and we didn’t know what was wrong with her. Then I called the ambulance.”

Toledano, 28, is a farmworker, like the rest of his family. He came to California from Mexico at the age of 14 in pursuit of the American Dream because at home there was nothing to eat. He made the trek from his home in San Martin Peras, Oaxaca, to San Diego, California, and was a migrant farmworker in Mexico long before he came to the U.S. – as a kid he picked tomatoes in Sinaloa, where there are neither bathrooms nor water for workers, and where being indigenous means putting up with strong racism from the mestizos, or mixed-race Mexicans. Toledano’s first language is not Spanish but Mixteco, an indigenous language. As Toledano puts it, the goal has always been survival. Prosperity? Maybe that will come later.

Stories like Toledano’s are commonplace these days in the farming regions of California. Economic conditions at home have forced entire generations of Mexicans to move north, with the promise that if they worked hard enough they would get ahead. But in the Toledano’s line of work, wages are low and health risks associated with the occupation – due to the physical nature of the labor and exposure to harmful agricultural pesticides and chemicals – are high.