Poulinna Po had just walked into the Long Beach offices of Khmer Girls in Action when she got the news: Governor Jerry Brown had vetoed Assembly Bill 1263, which promised to expand the number of state medical translators. The measure had seemed to offer a straightforward solution to the dilemmas faced by California’s estimated three million Medi-Cal beneficiaries who speak little or no English when they talk to Anglophone doctors or medical staff.
One tragic example of this kind of patient-doctor miscommunication occurred in 2008 at Los Angeles County General hospital, when a pregnant Maria Guevara, who only spoke Spanish, was prescribed an abortion-inducing drug — which she then took, believing it to be part of her prenatal care. She lost her baby.
“That lack of communication between the doctor and me has changed my life forever,” Guevara would later bitterly recount.
For the past year activists with other personal experiences successfully fought for passage of AB 1263 and were stunned to learn of the governor’s veto.
“I was like, ‘What? No way!’ I was left speechless,” said Po.
Po had learned the hard way how difficult it is to navigate a medical conversation between an English-speaking doctor and a patient who speaks little or no English. Two years ago, the then-15-year-old Po was drafted into service as a Cambodian translator for her diabetic father during his visits to the hospital.