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My Turnby Maileen Hamto |
 |
From The Asian Reporter, V17, #22 (May 29, 2007), page 6.
Caring for our own
The term Medicaid brings about negative connotations among many Americans who pride themselves on being self-sufficient. But the economic downturn and sustained slowdown have produced a sizeable number of working poor families who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck.
Access to quality health care is front and center in the everyday life of many Oregonians. A variety of factors contribute to skyrocketing healthcare costs in recent years. Rising costs of health insurance make it difficult for employers to provide health coverage for employees. Increased competition across many industries makes it difficult for businesses to stay profitable and provide benefits for workers.
Often, to offset the costs of providing benefits, businesses hire more part-time workers who don’t receive benefits such as health insurance. As a result, the working poor make up a growing under- class of employed and hard-working Oregonians who can’t afford to pay for health insurance.
The Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid plan, offers health care for the most vulnerable Oregonians and represents our collective effort at caring for our own. People who are uninsured — or, at best, served by the Oregon Health Plan — are no different from our own families, neighbors, and friends. A quick glance at the languages declared as the preferred written language by OHP members reveals a compendium of Asian languages: Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, Farsi, Korean, Lao, Hindi, Hmong, and Tagalog, among others.
CareOregon, one of the administrators of the Oregon Health Plan, recently hosted an exhibit of member photos at the state capitol in Salem. The goal of the project: to put a face on the people who are helped by the health insurance plan for low-income Oregonians, many of whom have complex medical problems.
Almost 70 percent of CareOregon’s members are age 18 and younger, and about half identify as people of color. Of the plan’s 100,000 members, about six percent are Asian.
I was involved in conducting member interviews and shooting casting photos for the project, truly an eye-opening experience. The stories that we uncovered through the project represent the hope, vitality, humanity, and dignity of the most vulnerable Oregonians.
Renowned photographer Bruce Davidson visited CareOregon members to capture life in their homes and communities. In 1962, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph what became a profound documentation of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In 1966, he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts, having spent two years bearing witness to the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem.
"To enter the lives of those who are sick, handicapped, or burdened with rare ailments was an eye-opener. It was a challenge to photograph these people with positive imagery that expressed their vitality, love, and hope," Davidson wrote of the CareOregon project.
Among the members that Davidson photographed was five-year-old Brandon, who was diagnosed with kidney cancer at six months. Uyen, his young mother, spends a large chunk of her days caring for her son.
The Kims are an immigrant Korean family who are establishing a new life for their children in the United States.
Now in her 60s, Le deals with the everyday struggle of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, brought on by her experiences as a refugee from war-torn Vietnam.
"These people and others are more or less invisible to the general public, and it is important to me that this imagery be very human where the ‘ordinary’ person can see it, identify, and see themselves in the images. In talking with the people I photographed, I found their words to be incredibly powerful," Davidson wrote.
The photographs are on display at CareOregon offices in downtown Portland. For information on CareOregon’s work, visit <www.careoregon.org>. To learn more about the Oregon Health Plan, visit <www.oregon.gov/DHS/healthplan>. To read more about Davidson’s work, visit <www.magnumphotos.com>.