A people's movement in the Bay Area has succeeded in forcing a hospital to reverse its refusal to perform a kidney transplant on an undocumented worker, Jesus Navarro, because of his immigration status. Navarro's struggle illustrates the inhumanity of a for-profit health care system, as well as the racist nature of capitalism.
Navarro, 35, has been living in the United States for 16 years and has worked at Pacific Steel in Berkeley, Calif., for 14 years. His kidneys began to shut down in 2004, but Navarro continued to work for Pacific Steel in order to help support himself and his wife, Alicia, by performing his own dialysis at home. As difficult as his situation was, Navarro believed that if he could get a kidney transplant he would enjoy a normal life.
He had a union job, and private insurance to pay for the operation as well as the expensive drugs that would allow his body to accept the new organ after the transplant. Without a transplant, Navarro knew he would probably die in his 30s. He waited on the transplant list for years.
In the spring of 2011, Navarro learned that he had moved to the top of the transplant list. In May, he went to the University of California-San Francisco Kidney Transplant Center to prepare for the operation. Instead, doctors interrogated Navarro about his immigration status. He acknowledged that he was undocumented, not thinking it could affect his health insurance.
The doctors told Jesus and Alicia that the hospital would not perform a transplant operation on an undocumented worker. Alicia offered her own kidney for the transplant, and even though it turned out that she and her husband were a tissue-match, the hospital refused to consider performing the operation that could save Navarro's life.
Why would the hospital do this? It would seem to make no sense even according to the ruthlessly inhumane rules of capitalism. Navarro, after all, was fully insured. The hospital and the drug companies had every reason to believe that they would profit by treating Navarro.
In an astoundingly candid response, Reece Fawley, executive director of transplantation at UCSF, explained that the hospital evaluates its patients for “socioeconomic stability.” In other words, for UCSF to save a life in situations like Navarro's when there would be continued care after the operation, the patient must not only have insurance, but it must appear to UCSF that there is no likelihood that the patient would lose his job and/or insurance, so as to assure that the hospital would not have to lose money on the continued care of the patient.
Of course, under capitalism, anyone can lose their job and insurance, but some groups, such as African-Americans, Latinos and, in particular, the undocumented, are much more likely to do so. Jesus Navarro, despite having held a steady job and being insured for 14 years, was thus not “socioeconomically stable” enough for UCSF to warrant a life-saving operation, due to being undocumented. In a grotesquely ironic twist, Navarro would soon lose his job due to his immigration status.
Back in March 2011, workers at Pacific Steel went on strike when the owners tried to make the workers pay part of the costs for their health plans. The strike, led by Local 164B of the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union, not only defeated the co-pays called for by the owners, but won the workers a $3.78 an hour raise.
The owners of Pacific Steel needed to put the workers back on the defensive. In January of 2012, the company performed an immigration audit of its largely Latino workforce. Two-hundred employees, including Navarro, were terminated due to their immigration status.
Community organizers rallied around Navarro's cause since an article about his predicament was published in the San Jose Mercury News on Jan. 30. .In a major victory, he was allowed to retain his private medical coverage.
Several medical organizations, such as the California Nurses Association, signed a letter to UCSF demanding that the hospital perform Navarro's surgery and pay for his post-operation expenses, if necessary. Many UCSF medical students started pressuring the administration to reverse its decision. An online petition to UCSF drew tens of thousands of signatures.
Due to unrelenting public pressure, UCSF issued a statement on Feb. 9, agreeing to perform the transplant on Navarro. The hospital characterized Navarro's plight as a “misunderstanding.”
This is not an isolated case. Many undocumented workers have been denied medical services they desperately need. Even though it currently appears that Navarro will receive the transplant, his case is demonstrative of the criminality of capitalism. The fact that popular outrage forced a large capitalist institution to reverse its inhuman policy demonstrates that the people have the power to fight successfully against this system.
