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“As the federal government abandons the people it is meant to serve, New York City is leaning in to protect public goods like health coverage.”
A few years ago, I was working in a doctor’s office scheduling colonoscopies and endoscopies—screenings that can detect cancer early, when it is most treatable. Each appointment I booked felt like a small act of prevention against a disease that has claimed the lives of so many.
One day the doctor stepped into our office with new instructions: Stop scheduling appointments for patients insured through Medicaid. The reimbursement process was too slow and cumbersome, he said. It simply wasn’t worth the hassle.
The room went quiet. We were handed a list of Medicaid-allied insurance carriers we were to no longer accept. As I scanned the list, my heart dropped. On it was the plan that covered my grandparents.
If my own grandparents called to book a cancer screening, I was expected to turn them away.
After that, I was determined to do something that would serve everyone in my community, not just those who can afford it. I wanted to help others who, like my grandparents, have been abandoned by our broken healthcare system.
Problems like this inspired me to work at the New York City Health Department. I’ve joined a new team of highly trained community health workers with a mission to help all New Yorkers access health insurance and other services they deserve. The new Health and Affordability Resource Team, or HART for short, is designed to protect struggling New Yorkers at risk of falling through the ever-widening holes in our country’s social safety net.
Created by the Health Department together with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, HART deploys dozens of community health workers like me into the neighborhoods where we’re needed most, and where many of us are from.
Through neighborhood outreach in 13 languages, we accompany people through each step of the process, from screening and applications to enrollment and follow-ups. Our primary goal is connecting people to health coverage and other essential benefits, housing stability and eviction prevention resources, and financial assistance for hospital bills.
We’re specially trained to help New Yorkers navigate the latest federal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, including expanded work requirements and red tape that put as many as 900,000 New Yorkers at risk. These are people who could lose their health insurance—not because they don’t qualify, but because the federal government has made keeping it prohibitively complicated and confusing.
We’re not going to stand for that. Because as the federal government abandons the people it is meant to serve, New York City is leaning in to protect public goods like health coverage.
Years after leaving my job at the cancer screening clinic, it hit me: this wasn’t a one-time decision or one bad provider. It was an entrenched, systemic problem. The cards have been stacked against so many New Yorkers who deserve the care they are being denied.
People are sorted not by their medical need, but by how quickly and conveniently a payment arrives. And the patients who can least afford to miss a cancer screening are the ones being quietly refused. Many will never know why.
That day in the doctor’s office, I could have looked away. I had a steady job and the decision wasn’t up to me. But once you see people losing critical health care like that, you carry it with you.
I left that job and went back to school, this time for public health. I wanted to understand not just how a system fails people, but how it can be redesigned so that it improves people’s lives at scale. I am continuing my studies to receive a master’s in public health, learning about program design and evaluation.
As I’ve studied, I continued working alongside New Yorkers. I held a case management role supporting people with disabilities who needed home health aides. That work taught me what the paperwork could not: Navigating benefits and approvals is exhausting for anyone, and for people already managing a disability or a chronic illness, it can be overwhelming. I have sat with clients as they navigated hurdles that never should have been there.
Today with the Health Department, I’m building on what I’ve learned in classrooms and through my lived experience to help others understand and navigate the barriers in their lives.
As part of the Health and Affordability Resource Team, I get to take meaningful action every day to make life better for my fellow New Yorkers. And now, if my grandparents were to call, there are many ways I can assist them, too.
Jasmine Taylor is a community health worker on the Health and Affordability Resource Team at the NYC Health Department.