Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2008
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The three Southern California immigrants reflect the widespread problem—and the potentially devastating consequences—of language barriers in healthcare. The problem’s massive scope was illuminated Thursday, when the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles released a new study documenting the language barriers faced by nearly one in three Los Angeles County residents, or 2.5 million people.
The data, based on the 2000 census, show that most of residents in five of the county’s eight service planning areas—which are used to plan and deliver health and social services—speak a language other than English at home. The top languages spoken are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Vietnamese, Persian, Japanese and Russian.
The largest number of limited-English speakers are in the San Gabriel Valley, totaling 482,310, including roughly 200,000 Mexicans and 100,000 Chinese. In the metro Los Angeles area, which includes downtown and other core areas of the city, the primary language spoken by 70% of residents is not English and 43% reported speaking limited English, the county’s highest rate.
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Miya Iwataki, director of diversity programs for the county Department of Health Services, said the language needs in the county’s four public hospitals were “overwhelming.” In 2006, 49% of the system’s 3.9 million patient visits involved people with limited English skills who primarily spoke one of 98 languages. Spanish speakers accounted for 1.9 million visits, followed by 17,000 visits by Korean speakers.
But Iwataki said county language services have improved in the last year. This year, nine full-time healthcare interpreters will be hired for the first time for the hospitals.
In addition, the county expanded its video medical interpretation system to all four hospitals this year. The system, which was introduced at Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center in Downey last year, uses video-conferencing technology to connect doctors and patients with an interpreter network that offers assistance in Armenian, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese.
County hospitals also use a phone-in interpreter system. But that system is flawed, according to Wingshan Lo of the Asian Pacific center. Lo said she tested the system last year and was hooked up to a language assistance center whose staffer did not understand the Cantonese she was speaking.
In addition, immigrant advocates said many hospital staff are not aware that healthcare providers who receive federal funding are legally required to offer language assistance, regardless of the patients’ immigration status. PALS for Health, a Los Angeles nonprofit organization that provides language assistance, gets several complaints every month about healthcare providers who tell patients they need to find their own interpreters, according to Marchela Iahdjian of the organization.
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Original article
(Posted on March 21, 2008)
Comments
Language is all important. It determines if you will even get a job. Don’t some of the dunderheads who call themselves Americans realize this? How stupid are some of the citizens fo this nation. English should have been declared the official language years ago, and all signs in Spanish removed from the nation.
Posted by Bobby at 4:42 PM on March 21
Where is the compassion for English-speaking patients with immigrant nurses from African nations who hate white people? That is the case at Kaiser, a very prominent HMO in the Los Angeles area. Aside from the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) hostility, they lack technical proficiency. Understanding nuances in symptoms is the cornerstone of their profession — lacking an expansive vocabulary, they simply cannot do their job.
Posted by at 5:28 PM on March 21
At least America’s linguistic problem could be solved if all immigration was stopped for several decades. But it won’t be.
Posted by at 12:12 AM on March 22
That is the case at Kaiser, a very prominent HMO in the Los Angeles area.
Most HMOs deliver substandard care, but Kaiser Permanente is one of the worst. They are notorious for killing people. Do not have anything to do with them unless you absolutely have to.
Posted by qwerty at 12:41 AM on March 22
My question, as always, is irrelevant. Who paid for this ‘study’?
The taxpayers? Then it’s a crime. it’s a common sense. I’d do such study for a dollar. Take it: if one cannot communicate with a doctor due to his lack of language he is not going to get an appropriate help. Period.
Hey, smarties of CA, next time you want a study — call me — I’ll save you a lot of money.
Here is a great solution (no charge). Send them back to Mexico to get help from Mexican Aesculapiuses.
Posted by alex at 1:17 PM on March 22
Bobby: “English should have been declared the official language years ago, and all signs in Spanish removed from the nation.”
No— language barriers and Spanish are the least of the problems transforming LA into a Third World disaster within the budding failed statelet of Aztlan.
Having lived in California for many years and done jobs in neighboring Arizona, I can tell you that any efforts to “improve English proficiency” would not make even cosmetic improvements in this increasing fiasco of a region— it’s not language that’s the problem, it’s sheer demographics and the behavior and background of the people streaming in, along with the resulting crime, narcotics, vandalism, traffic, crowding and ruin of our towns and cities. If you ever work in one of the overcrowded California prisons, you’ll find that most of the hardened Central American criminals, gangsters and drug-runners speak English, but this does nothing to reduce the violence and malaise that they cause in society.
If anything, the English-speaking immigrants and their higher-generation descendants are even worse than the ones who know only Spanish. The Spanish-speakers at least tend to keep to themselves and work— as for the ones who speak English, if anything they become even more prone to commit violent crime against their native-born neighbors, sell drugs, drop out of school and otherwise cause a royal mess of things here.
We need to accept the sobering facts here, and realize that the only thing that will save the USA is an immediate and sharp reduction in immigration— legal as well as illegal— along with mass deportations. While there’s an understandable impulse behind English-only initiatives, or individual actions such as Geno’s English-only cheesesteak restaurant in Philadelphia, these are just wastes of our scarce resources. Language is not the problem here, demographics is.
In the schools of both California and Arizona, the vast majority of the new students are non-White. This state of affairs is spreading elsewhere, and the fact is that American Whites, the founding population of this nation, will be in the minority by around 2020-2025. Whatever else we do is useless once this demographic reality comes to bear— as soon as we approach a White-minority USA, we cease to be a Western nation, and we effectively perish as a people. Again, legal immigration levels as much as illegal have to be sharply curtailed— we allow in over 1.2 million legal immigrants every year, almost all of them non-White, and so our point of demographic no return accelerates every year through chain migration.
One can sympathize with the desperation of the Central Americans who stream in here every year, but our open-borders policies do nothing to solve the underlying problems in the sending countries, while importing those same problems here to North America. There’s a reason that millions of White families are leaving states like California and Arizona, some even emigrating permanently to other Western nations such as Germany, Switzerland or Denmark— they can see the ugly handwriting on the North American wall. Without radical policy changes, and very soon, we are finished as a nation.
Posted by Bulwark at 1:58 PM on March 22
Bulwark, I appreciate some of your conclusions as to the reasons massive, unassimilating illegal or even legal immigration are bad for the nation. I know what you mean about some of the English speaking hispanics being often worse than the Spanish speaking ones. I have seen this myself, having lived in California for most of my life.
However, I still disagree about the language issue, but I probably should have made it clear that I was thinking of not only California but of the U.S. as a whole. Language either unites or divides people. This fact is seems obvious but it has even deeper implications. Language is tied up with such things as beliefs, attitudes,and all kinds of emotions. If people are operating with the beliefs common in Mexico, for example, how will they ever relate to an American. We don’t believe a girl is a neer women at twelve, for example. We don’t understand the idioms of Mexican music, we don’t believe in elitism,etc. Mexicans do believe these things and continue to believe them. It is easy for them to because of access to Mexican newspapers, music,(a dozen stations in the Los Angeles area alone) and dozens of other things that keeps them uniquely Mexican. If you open o newspaper in Los Angeles or much of California and turn to the job ads, you have “Spanish required,” “bilingual helpfull”, “must know conversational Spanish,etc.) My point was, and I apologize for being a little unclear, that this is not what is going to make for harmony in the greater United States and it would be better if all bilingual signs were removed across the nation, so that these people would be forced into a situation that previous immigrants found themselves in. I think this, and the excellent point you make of stopping the massive flow of unassimilated people would greatly relieve the stress on everyone in this nation. I am old enough to remember a Los Angeles, for example, that did have some signs in Spanish, but when it came to putting Spanish on a level with English, it never was until now. I think that’s bad.
Posted by Bobby at 7:43 PM on March 22
Bobby, I see what you’re saying, for me this is just a matter of distributing our forces for the fight ahead. I’m skeptical about undertaking efforts for lost causes, since I saw this all the time in California and Arizona— lots of well-meaning nationalists and anti-immigrationists wasting valuable time and energy on ultimately futile causes such as English-only laws, feel-good pro-assimilation messages and other peripheral issues that did nothing to stem the tide.
All of these things ultimately wound up being fingers in the dam— the sheer demographic wave of people from Central America utterly overwhelmed all these half-baked efforts and effectively destroyed the neighborhoods throughout these states.
I guess I’m just being coldly realistic here, but the fact is, demographics underlies all these other social problems, and unless we address the root cause, we’re wasting our time. So long as our immigration numbers— not just illegal, but legal chain migration, are so ridiculously high— then we’re wasting our time with everything else we do.
When I was a kid, I never, ever heard of White Americans wanting to emigrate from our country— this was the world’s favorite Western country. Now, I can’t swing a stick anymore without talking to a neighbor somewhere or a young guy starting up his career, who is planning a move to somewhere like Germany, France or Finland. Not just the heavily-educated pros, but also just tradespeople with skills, folks who want to open local shops. They’re emigrating b/c they don’t see a Western future for the USA, and don’t want to raise their kids here or in a place like Australia or the UK with similar immigration and affirmative action practices. This is partly due to the Euro vs. dollar advantage, but it’s more than that. As I explained elsewhere, these Euro countries, even with their own flaws, seem to be more consciously nationalistic, and once American families learn the languages there, they really flourish. This seems to explain the increasing inclination to move families across the Atlantic, and so long as our demographics irrevocably change to push a White minority— while we’re told to shut up and like it— people are going to leave.
Posted by Bulwark at 1:07 PM on March 23
None of these immigrants are Americans. In language and race, they cannot be called Americans. Otherwise, what do we call the white person who speaks English with an American accent and whose ancestors have lived in America for centuries? It is obvious to him that the teaming masses of Mexicans and Asians in LA are not of his ethnic group. Yet many or most of them are citizens and thus “Americans”. They can go back to wherever they came from (which is often an ethno-state) and be amongst their own kind. For the Korean, for instance, there is a country called Korea that is filled with Koreans. That’s where Koreans belong. Koreans would not consider white immigrants Korean even if they learned the language. Yet here in America, white Americans are supposed to have no identity. Everyone in the world is America as long as they have citizenship. To suggest otherwise is nativist or racist.
Posted by Hran at 4:06 PM on March 23
This is the reason that AT&T and other companies have so many complaints. The immigrants speak English but do not know the meaning of the words, therefore when you get your first bill and your eyes pop out, you realize they signed you up everything.
Posted by at 5:13 PM on March 23
Don’t raise the bride, lower the river!!!
If these damned third-world trash people can’t or won’t learn even Basic English — THROW THEM OUT OF COUNTRY! A half-century ago, getting at least minimal English skills was a REQUISITE for obtaining American citizenship!
Today, the third-world trash expects, DEMANDS, that we change OUR White American culture and society to fit theirs. If this craziness is not putting the cart before the horse, I don’t know what it is.
Firstly, these damned illegals should not even be allowed to remain in America — by definition, they’re CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS! Secondly, why should we American taxpayers be FORCED to subsidize these criminal illegal aliens? With free health care, free schooling for them and their dependents, not to mention those welfare subsidies — welfare checks, subsidized rent, food stamps…
Make Mexico PAY the freight! Even if they happen to be from some other Latin American country, they probably came through Mexico. So force the Mexican government to pay the costs.
Posted by Fed Up at 12:58 PM on March 24
It takes a very peculiar mindset to immigrate to a foreign country without first learning the language, only to demand free medical care from the locals once you are there.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 1:27 PM on March 25
Spanish speakers accounted for 1.9 million visits, followed by 17,000 visits by Korean speakers.
The writer implies that there are MANY immigrants encountering this problem, but the truth is that it is ILLEGAL MEXICANS.
In addition, immigrant advocates said many hospital staff are not aware that healthcare providers who receive federal funding are legally required to offer language assistance, regardless of the patients’ immigration status.
This is the excuse the Education System uses for not screening illegals. The more students they have - the more money they get and since they’re “not allowed” to check immigration status, the illegals don’t have to provide birth certificates and vaccination records like American kids do. Then the money is spent on teaching them in THEIR language. I knew of a junior high school in Mission Viejo, CA that had to provide a separate teacher for 3 Farsee speaking students while the American kids were squished into classes with 35 students.
Posted by at 8:47 PM on March 25
