Health vs Wealth

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dream – Episode "Health vs Wealth"

Episode Information:

• Title: The Dream
• Host: Little Everywhere
• Episode: Health vs Wealth
• Release Date: March 21, 2025

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Introduction

In the "Health vs Wealth" episode of The Dream, hosts Little Everywhere engage in a profound discussion with Gina Viola, a seasoned small business owner, mother, and former mayoral candidate. The conversation delves deep into the complexities of the American healthcare system, the impact of private equity on healthcare delivery, and the pursuit of single-payer healthcare as a solution to systemic failures.

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Meet Gina Viola: A Reluctant Leader with Bold Visions [00:38]

Gina Viola introduces herself as a dedicated mother of two college-bound children and the owner of an employment agency specializing in staffing trade shows—a niche she highlights spent a decade popularizing before events like Comic Con transformed the industry. Her leadership qualities, though self-professed as "reluctant," have consistently positioned her at the forefront of social and political activism.

Gina Viola [01:24]: "I'm a really reluctant leader. I love to go and be a participant. I love to do the heavy lifting. And lo and behold, I always end up in that leadership space."

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The Mayoral Run and the Quest for Single-Payer Healthcare [02:43]

Gina recounts her mayoral campaign in Los Angeles, emphasizing her commitment to single-payer healthcare. Despite garnering significant support—45,000 votes and contributing to the election of a city council member—she faced setbacks within the Democratic establishment, particularly from figures like Buffy Wicks who opposed her healthcare initiatives.

Gina Viola [07:49]: "That is single payer Healthcare. You, me, the governor, every single person in this state has the exact same plan, period."

Gina criticizes the existing healthcare framework dominated by private equity and insurance companies, highlighting how these entities prioritize profit over patient care, leading to increased costs and diminished quality of service.

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Measure R Campaign: Fighting Jail Expansion and Advocating for Alternatives [01:03]

Gina discusses her involvement in the Measure R campaign, aimed at halting the construction of new jails in Los Angeles County. Collaborating with organizations like White People for Black Lives, the campaign sought to redirect $3.5 billion towards studying alternatives to incarceration and enhancing civilian oversight of law enforcement.

Gina Viola [03:46]: "What we did was we shared stories of harm at the door with one another. We tried to share jail stories, but a lot of white people don't even know they have jail stories."

Her door-to-door outreach strategy involved personal storytelling to connect with voters who previously felt disconnected from issues of incarceration and its broader societal impacts.

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Private Equity's Grip on Healthcare: A System Under Siege [12:24]

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the infiltration of private equity firms into the healthcare sector. Gina elucidates how these firms acquire nonprofit hospitals, immediately sell them for profits, and lease them back—thereby compromising the quality of care.

Gina Viola [12:46]: "Private equity, you know, it's another entity coming into our health care that is purely for profit. And when you're looking at our health care from a standpoint of profit, we lose."

She paints a grim picture of a healthcare system where physicians are compelled to see more patients in less time, administrative burdens increase, and overall patient care deteriorates. This profit-driven approach, according to Gina, leads to delayed treatments, denied services, and, ultimately, preventable deaths.

Gina Viola [17:06]: "People are dying. People are not having. People are choosing not to buy insurance anymore."

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Personal Anecdotes: The Human Cost of a Failing System [10:16 - 19:15]

Gina shares poignant stories illustrating the dire consequences of the current healthcare model. One such narrative involves a woman unable to receive urgent care for a bleeding finger due to bureaucratic hurdles with Medi-Cal, forcing her to seek help miles away from the clinic.

Gina Viola [15:03]: "She drove 30 miles with her finger bloody to an OBGYN friend who then sewed up her finger even though she normally sews hoo ha's."

These anecdotes underscore the urgent need for systemic reform to ensure timely and equitable healthcare access for all, irrespective of socioeconomic status.

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Political Betrayal and the Fight for Genuine Reform [23:14]

The discussion takes a critical turn as Gina addresses political betrayals within the Democratic Party, specifically highlighting how alliances and friendships with insurance industry leaders have stymied progress toward single-payer healthcare.

Gina Viola [23:14]: "My aunt went onto the Facebook page and said, oh, this is perfect. Gina was mayor of the playground. She was always mayor."

Her frustration is palpable as she describes the challenges of advocating for meaningful change within a political system that often prioritizes party allegiance over substantive policy advancements.

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Respectability Politics and the Need for Radical Action [25:12]

Gina critiques the prevalent use of respectability politics within activist circles, arguing that it dilutes the urgency of the movements and imposes excessive constraints on how advocacy is conducted.

Gina Viola [25:13]: "When they say make America great again, I'm like, what does that even mean? You know, they mean make America white again is what they mean."

She advocates for a more militant and uncompromising approach to activism, emphasizing that incremental changes are insufficient to dismantle entrenched systems of oppression and exploitation.

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Conclusion: A Call to Action for Comprehensive Healthcare Reform [29:19]

As the episode concludes, Gina passionately urges listeners to join organizations like Healthcare for Us, which are committed to pushing for single-payer healthcare through both legislative efforts and grassroots activism.

Gina Viola [28:22]: "Find the thing that you're passionate about. Lock in. Like if it's going to police commission to tell the police to stop killing black people every week and that's the thing you do."

Her final message is a rallying cry for collective action to overthrow a broken healthcare system and establish a more just and equitable framework that prioritizes human well-being over corporate profits.

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Notable Quotes:

• Gina Viola [07:49]: "That is single payer Healthcare. You, me, the governor, every single person in this state has the exact same plan, period."

• Gina Viola [17:06]: "People are dying. People are not having. People are choosing not to buy insurance anymore."

• Gina Viola [25:13]: "When they say make America great again, I'm like, what does that even mean? You know, they mean make America white again is what they mean."

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Final Thoughts

"Health vs Wealth" offers a compelling exploration of the interplay between economic interests and healthcare outcomes in America. Through Gina Viola's insights and experiences, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the systemic barriers to achieving the American Dream, especially in the realm of public health. The episode serves as both an informative analysis and a passionate call to action for those committed to fostering meaningful change.

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This summary is intended for informational purposes and reflects the content discussed in the specified episode of "The Dream." For a more comprehensive understanding, listeners are encouraged to tune into the full episode.

Transcript

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[Gina Viola]

Foreign.

[Jane Marie]

I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream.

[Gina Viola]

I am a mother of two public school children now in college. I am a small business owner for the last, I guess, 30 years now. I have an employment agency that specializes in staffing trade shows. That's my day job.

[Jane Marie]

Wait, say what? I don't trade shows.

[Gina Viola]

Do you know that I spent the first 10 years owning this business having to tell people what a trade show was? Comic Con changed all of that.

[Jane Marie]

This is Gina Viola, who ran for mayor a few years ago and lost, perhaps because of her lofty goals, which include single payer health care. My first question, tell me why someone does that. Well, start from the beginning. Were you the president of your eighth grade class? Like, what?

[Gina Viola]

Okay, so my aunt says, I never had a Facebook until I was running for mayor in 2022. So it was my one concession I made is now there's a Gina Viola on Facebook. I know, but my aunt went onto the Facebook page and said, oh, this is perfect. Gina was mayor of the playground. She was always mayor. I was like, that is so funny. I'm a really reluctant leader. Like, I love to go and be a participant. I love to do the heavy lifting. And lo and behold, I always end up in that leadership space.

[Jane Marie]

A reluctant leader, but also like a type, a controlling type.

[Gina Viola]

I don't want to spend all day figuring out where six chairs go. That's the biggest. That's the biggest complaint people would have working with me is they're like, you're not letting anybody else do anything. And I'm like, I just want to get it done.

[Jane Marie]

I know.

[Gina Viola]

So we can do the thing.

[Jane Marie]

Well, does that interrupt your life anywhere else? Like, I have that problem where I'm like, well, I'll just do it better and faster.

[Gina Viola]

So, I mean, I've gotten a lot better at it in the last 10 years.

[Jane Marie]

But you've been working on it? No.

[Gina Viola]

Well, and I also worked with an organizer, Tristan, on the Measure R campaign. And they specifically said, if you're doing anything alone, you're doing it wrong. And I was like, that's such good advice, because I would often go early just to do a bunch of it alone.

[Jane Marie]

Tell me about Measure R. Long live.

[Gina Viola]

Measure R. Measure R was a county campaign back in 2020 to stop the jail expans here in Los Angeles. So. But yeah, the county had slated $3.5 billion to build two new jails. One county, L.A. county, this county. So Patrisse, Cullors, Justice, La, a bunch of other orgs got together and wrote this bill that said, absolutely not. What you need to do is put some money into a study how alternatives to incarceration would be beneficial rather than building two new jails. And we had a second part to our bill, subpoena power for the Civilian Oversight Commission of the Sheriff. It was so interesting because I went door to door for months and months and months because basically what we were tasked with at White People for Black Lives was bringing in the white vote. Because this is a measure that most white folks don't think concerned them at all. What we did was we shared stories of harm at the door with one another. We tried to share jail stories, but a lot of white people don't even know they have jail stories. Like, I can't tell you. I would knock on a door and I'd say, do you know anyone who's been to jail? And they would say, no. So I would start sharing my story of somebody I knew who'd been to jail. And then they'd be like, oh, wait, my nephew went to jail. Oh, wait, I went to jail.

[Jane Marie]

Or, you know, I myself, actually, I'm on parole right now, And I forgot.

[Gina Viola]

80% of them, no, they have no one that they know has been to jail. So then we would switch to harm stories. Do you know, have you ever been harmed or have you ever struggled and received the care and help you needed to get past things? And those stories often involved. When I would ask people about their harm, it was always about property. Yes. One time my car got stolen. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. What? And I'm like, that's nice. Lucky you. Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

Seriously.

[Gina Viola]

No, lucky you. I mean, the doors that were the most interesting were the ones that had no jail or no harm stories and would double down even after I told both of mine, like, at length.

[Jane Marie]

What are yours?

[Gina Viola]

My mother Went to jail. She pulled a gun on her then second husband because she was in the middle of a mental health crisis and he was scary. No, he's a great guy. She's a little scary. No, she's not. She's very paranoid and damaged and has never received the care she should. They threw her in a jail cell and left her there for 10 days in this cell with no services until my brother went up and advocated for her release. So the story is so unreal and complicated and such an indictment of how racist our system is because A, she was left there because she was white. Right. Like, they didn't further move her, take steps to move her to prison, even have a hearing for her, but she was left in this cell with no services, which is exactly what she was having a paranoid fit about. She was convince was coming to take her child. It solidified for her that she's been right all along, that everyone's against her. Yeah, my brother got up there and advocated for her and I mean, she was released to him with nothing. No hearing, no trial, no further dealings with the system at all simply because my brother went up and, you know, so again, had she been a different color, there's no way that would have gone down that way. So after I ran for mayor, I was thinking, okay, I need to, you know, 45,000 people voted for us, 7%. We knocked out a city council person, a city attorney. I felt it was a party. I ran as no party.

[Jane Marie]

Oh, okay.

[Gina Viola]

But these are all Democrats because, you know, to run for mayor of Los Angeles, you become a fake Democrat like Rick Caruso did. So it's funny, the Democratic clubs would have me on to do endorsements and I'd be like, you guys know I'm not a Democrat, right? And they're like, but I was thinking, I need to do something meaningful with this small platform. So I decided I would do healthcare because single payer healthcare, more often than not, when I would look at solutions to problems that we have in this city, single payer healthcare ticks a lot of boxes. Even if you talk about our unhoused, which is the biggest crisis that we have. Right. Seven people a day dying on the streets of Los Angeles, most of them black. Right. Even though black folks represent about, I think, less than 6% of the population at this point. Think about seeing somebody struggling on the streets and being able to take them to any clinic and them getting some help like that is. It almost sounds like a fairy tale. It's a dream come true. That is single payer Healthcare. You, me, the governor, every single person in this state has the exact same plan, period. That is single payer health care. Which means, you know it's going to be good because Gavin Newsom wants good health care.

[Jane Marie]

Sure.

[Gina Viola]

All the California legislators want good health care. All of the people in government want good health care. And so when these folks are all in the same buckets, we are, you know, the specialty clinics would be truly what they're for. Right. Like if you have women's clinics. Yeah. It would be for women. Right now what they're for are private equity firms. Therefore health insurance companies. Right. To make money with off of the government dollars like this private equity piece. Even the health insurance industry scam. Scam is a mechanism by which public dollars are funneled into private companies. And it is, it's atrocious. I see it. I saw it in housing first and I see it in healthcare now.

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[Gina Viola]

So I joined Healthcare for Us, an all volunteer organization that is fully committed to the passage of a single payer health care bill here in California. Of course we do support efforts at the federal level for Medicare for all as well, but our sole primary focus is here in California for the state bill. What was astounding to me, the biggest thing that was astounding to me at first was like how many people have stopped seeking care because it's even people with insurance because it's so complicated and.

[Jane Marie]

Expensive even if you have insurance. Yeah.

[Gina Viola]

So this, this had me digging for like answers about that and I kept coming up with this private equity piece, this private equity piece, private equity, you know, it's another entity coming into our health care that is purely for profit. And when you're looking at our health care from a standpoint of profit, we lose. We lose.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Gina Viola]

Because the only way they make money is to delay, deny, and let us die. And that is exactly what happens. So to get into the nitty gritty, what I was looking at specifically were these nonprofit hospitals that they were buying in large quantities. Private equity groups were buying. And I found that you had to keep them nonprofit for five years, but five years in a day, no longer. So they would immediately sell the brick and mortar hospitals, untold dollars of profits to their shareholders and then make the hospitals lease them back. This is legal private equity got in for two reasons. One, it's trillions and trillions of dollars being made by the health insurance industry, right? And then also the health insurance industry saw that its days were probably gonna be numbered at some point because it's just things are collapsing in on themselves and they've squeezed with their greed every last pen of us. There just isn't any money left. Which is why they've gotten into Medicaid, why they've gotten into Medicare Advantage, because they want those government dollars too. They've squeezed everything they could out of the private sector, and now they're going for the government dollars as well. Folks smarter than me sitting up at the top realize that's going to come to an end. It's going to have a breaking point. Much like the housing bubble burst, there's going to be a medical bubble that will burst. Like that's where we are with our medical care these days. Like it really has degraded. So many people I know are seeking alternative sources. You know, a friend I know hurt her finger, punctured her finger. She was bleeding out in an exer clinic and said, I need stitches. Like you need to help me. She was bleeding out in their lobby. And they said, what's your medi cal number? She didn't know her medi cal number. So her friend took her to CVS across the street. Cause she had the smarts to say, let's go get your medi cal number from cvs. Got the medi cal number, went back to the XR clinic. The XR clinic still said, oh, it looks like you didn't quite finish your picking your plan, picking your group, so we can't help you.

[Jane Marie]

Just give me some liquid skin you drink.

[Gina Viola]

She drove 30 miles with her finger bloody to an OBGYN friend who then sewed up her finger even though she normally sews hoo ha's. So, you know, everybody would. But that was the solution because there was no care. And that's where we're headed. That's when I'm talking About the bubble bursting. You know, what you're seeing with private equity is coming in and buying what they can. And now, unfortunately, private equity can borrow against, like, let's say they go in and buy a bunch of clinics with brick and mortar. They can borrow against that on day one and pay out the shareholders on day one. They don't even have to wait that time anymore. So there's an end date to that. That game is going to break. So when I'm saying the health insurance industry saw this coming, you know, those executives are also on the boards of many private equity firms. Right. And let's face it, BlackRock not only owns most of our housing stock, now they're going to own most of our healthcare, too.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Gina Viola]

So buying out and then what's happening for physicians? I mean, this is terrible for physicians because physicians historically worked for hospitals or worked for groups, you know, and they had a certain amount of ability to actually be able to care for patients. Now they're all working for these private equity firms. And again, the motive is profit fast. Now, now, now, the only way to get that is to see more patients, spend less time with patients and do more administration and cut costs in ways that hurt people. Which, as you know from the nursing home stuff that you researched. Cause that was our first. Like, we should have paid attention when that started happening, when we started seeing what folks were being paid inside the nursing homes once they got bought by private equity, the folks they'd even hire, gone are the union workers on that, gone are the nurses.

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Gina Viola]

Like, these are regular people getting minimum wage, if that, to do a high level of care.

[Jane Marie]

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. When you were talking about someone going in to get their finger sewn up, the person at the front desk is always the one taking the heat on this shit. But like, like their heightened sense of fear all the time, that's similar to the people in the lobby. You know, like, I have to follow these rules or this private equity company that pays me shit is going to kick me out.

[Gina Viola]

I think the health insurance, the health care industry as a whole is under a huge demoralization. Like, there's people are not happy, nurses are not happy, administrators are not happy, doctors are not happy. There's a doctor in Chicago, Dr. Eric Reinhardt, who is trying to unionize physicians. Right. Because this is like, he sees this as the only hope to being able to fight back against these parameters being set by, frankly, Robber Barron's of the insurance industry and now the private equity industry. When you look at Aetna's decision to buy cvs. To me, that was them seeing, okay, we may not always be Aetna, but we'll always be cvs, right?

[Jane Marie]

What do you mean by that?

[Gina Viola]

Like when the, when the dam bursts on the insurance industry scam because, you know, I have to keep hoping otherwise I'm going to fall into despair that we will have Medicare for all and the insurance industry will go away. Folks know that. Folks know what that date is. The folks at the top know what that date is because the care is eroding and people are just not going anymore. I mean, it's.

[Jane Marie]

People are just dying.

[Gina Viola]

People are dying. People are not having. People are choosing not to buy insurance anymore. People are, you know, frustrated. They've made Medicaid, which is medi cal in California, so complicated that if you don't stay on top of it, people just like, whatever. It's wild to think that that's where we are and the we wealthiest state in the wealthiest county in the wealthiest city that this country in this world has ever known.

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[Gina Viola]

Okay, so we had a bill AB 2200 last year California legislator for single payer health care for California. Everybody in the Democratic party and we have a super majority in the Democratic Party, you know, will put on their website will say out loud and proud they are strong supporters of single payer health care. Right. Buffy Wicks, she is a legislator up in Northern California in Oakland, did a whole I don't know what it was podcast something with AD Barkin who died recently of he started Be a Hero. He was advocating for Medicare for all for you know, nationwide and he used his own illness to like make a lot of comparisons about why how horrible our healthcare system is. And so he did a whole thing with Buffy Wicks. She's in California, she's a California representative. She actually killed the AB 2200 bill even though outwardly she's with AD Barkin saying I'll go to my grave to get us single payer healthcare. Like this level of betrayal that we see speaks to your point. Like who you know Gavin Newsom ran on single payer healthcare, ran on it. And when he wasn't recalled, like part of the reason some of us got in and fought for him to not be recalled. I remember Francesca Fiorentini specifically telling me this. Like she worked hard to have him not to be recalled. And one of the reasons was because of his stance on single payer healthcare. He's the reason we don't have it. He is the reason.

[Jane Marie]

Tell me what you think his thinking is though and how do you think.

[Gina Viola]

His best friend is the executive, is the president of Blue Shield like in real life, like that is truly his bestie is either the VP or president of Blue Shield.

[Jane Marie]

So what's so dumb about us that we didn't see that before he ran?

[Gina Viola]

We see it, but we think we can out it publicly and hold him to something bigger because he wants to run for something bigger. In fact, when we shout shouted him down at the CAEDM convention in 2024, I guess it was, what are we? No. 23. Eric and I went and unfurled a Calcare now banner. There's a whole group of activists, patients out of patients, stood up on chairs and chanted calcare now in front of him. So much so that he was the only one of that whole convention that couldn't use his speech for rebroadcasting like everybody else did. Yes.

[Jane Marie]

I wish we would have done that at the.

[Gina Viola]

We need to do it all the time.

[Jane Marie]

I know we need to do it all the time.

[Gina Viola]

This is the thing. We need to do it all the time. We shouldn't have to rely on Luigi to kill all the CEOs to get this kind of attention. Like, that's where the feet to the fire needs to be. But more importantly, I mean, to your point, we need a quick left turn at this point. It's not even a gradual left turn.

[Jane Marie]

It isn't good.

[Gina Viola]

I think it's good in small pockets. Hyper locally.

[Jane Marie]

Sure.

[Gina Viola]

When things are hyper localized and you have a city like Denver, let's take Denver, that's committed to unarmed crisis response, that's committed to a housing first approach on getting people off the streets and into housing. You know, when you have hyperlocal municipalities that do care about people's basic rights as a nation. When has it been good? Never. Our birth defect is terrible. We were born on tyranny and terror.

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Gina Viola]

Like, so never. I'm gonna say to you, never. Like, when they say make America great again, I'm like, what does that even mean? You know, they mean make America white again is what they mean. And back to the norms. And they're gonna use respectability politics and decorum. Like, that's gonna kill us all.

[Jane Marie]

Tell me more about that.

[Gina Viola]

So respectability politics is. So I'm in a room of activists that are tired of this and have been advocating for a single payer for 30 years. And they're like, we need to do more so that one of the members of our board, like, formed patients out of patience, and we had patient gowns on at the Kadam convention. We were taking it to that level. But even that being said, there's still an amount of but we gotta do it within what's reasonable. We gotta not make the nurses uncomfortable. We gotta not. And there's such a stronghold on us in this manner. In fact, I was just reading an article from somebody who was. They had me. I mean, they were really talking about what we needed to do to, like, really firm up a general strike day and a working families party and all that. But then right up at the end, they're like, you know, and be respectful when you go to city council. And I'm like, ugh, out. I'm out. Because the minute, you know, the respectability politics piece comes in, I will say my one. When I was running for mayor, I had a moment in a debate where I chose not to bring something up. Ooh, yeah. Very, very quickly.

[Jane Marie]

You decided that very quickly.

[Gina Viola]

Yeah, I decided it very quickly. So it was against Kevin De Leon and Karen Bass. It was the three of us. And I was hammering him about his sweeps in his district. So our unhoused people are often met with what's called sweeps. So our city's solution for homelessness is police and sanitation, which is why the public at large now view unhoused people as criminal trash. So the sweep will come with sanitation to tell you, get lost, and they throw away all of your belongings. Just up in Vallejo, last week, they killed a man. People were saying, there's a man asleep in this tent. And they let the bulldozer in and the bulldozer ran over. Yes, yes. But on the tip of my tongue was mentioning the man who had died during one of his sweeps in Little Tokyo. And I held back. Thankfully, my co chair at HC4S, Erica, afterwards, you know, she knows me so well and she gave me feedback. Cause she was an actress. So she was like, trying to help me present better. And she said, that's your first step to political betrayal.

[Jane Marie]

Whoa.

[Gina Viola]

She said you. Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

Did you start crying immediately?

[Gina Viola]

I mean, I have chills even repeating it.

[Jane Marie]

I'm here feeling it myself.

[Gina Viola]

People often ask me, wow, you've sent all these folks to city council. Didn't you vet them? The system corrupts the minute you get there. You're complicit because you are immediately making deals.

[Jane Marie]

So this is something we had considered doing a season of the Dream on, like, who becomes a politician? Where we started this conversation, like, what got you into politics? And there's been a bunch of research about how politicians, for the most part, they feel so strongly about something that they're willing to put themselves in the line of fire or follow the rules. So straight like, it's, it's you.

[Gina Viola]

The expression is run to win, lead to lose. If you really are gonna do anything in this system worth anything, go in and do it in one term. Because if all you care about is getting reelected or your next seat, it's over. So find the thing that you're passionate about. Lock in. Like if it's going to police commission to tell the police to stop killing black people every week and that's the thing you do. Or if it's, you know, other things you can do to. And in terms of health care, join health care first. You know, join our organization because we are committed to doing, to being more militant in getting what we want. We're not going to just have legislative visits. We're not, you know, we're going to. Even if it means we have to mutual aid our way into that care.

[Jane Marie]

Sure.

[Gina Viola]

That's what we're going to do.

[Jane Marie]

Free Luigi.

[Gina Viola]

Free Luigi.

[Jane Marie]

That's it for this week. We have a tip line open. Call us at 323-2481-488-323-2481, and leave us a message about anything that you think is funky out there. What's going on, guys? Talk to me.

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[Gina Viola]

All of a sudden, I see Harvey.

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He's over the table. He grabs me by the collar.

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