LOS ANGELES — For the last 20 years, Araceli Garcia Damaso has been selling fruit in the shadow of a South Los Angeles clinic.

"I'm hanging in there," she said in Spanish.

Survival has been Garcia's main focus, she said. Everything else has been left up to fate.

"What I pray to God for is health," she said.

Garcia sells to doctors and patients of the clinic and has access to an indigent care program. But Garcia, who is undocumented, poor and diabetic, has no health insurance.

"I don't expect anything from the government because I'm undocumented," she said.

Garcia, therefore, self-medicates often with over-the-counter drugs but has still ended up in the emergency room a handful of times. One time it was her husband who had appendicitis. More recently, it was Garcia when she had kidney stones.

"The pain was horrific," she said. "It was just like going into labor, on and on and on. I was bent over in pain."

The lack of power over one's health is frightening, Garcia added.

"It's something I wouldn't wish on anyone," she said as her eyes swelled up with tears.

An estimated 3 million people in California are uninsured, like Garcia, and another 12 million are underinsured. But Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, introduced legislation that would change that.

"We want to create a health care system that would prioritize the health care of people over bottom line profits," he said.

To do that, Assembly Bill 1400 would create a single-payer guaranteed healthcare program for all, called CalCare. Critics of single-payer healthcare systems say the program increase taxes, lead to longer wait times and lowers the overall quality of care. But Santiago said that argument ignores the millions of people who currently don't have access to any real type of health care.

"There is no doubt when we talk to the average person that our healthcare system needs to change, particularly now," he said. "I stress again because the starting point for many people during the COVID crisis is that they didn't have health care."

The bill is sitting in committee for now, but Santiago hopes it can be worked, debated and voted on over the next year. The biggest hurdle, for now, is identifying how the program will be funded.

"There will be an upfront cost that will be significant, but we argue that the cost of health care today is significant," Santiago said. "And what we are looking at is a reduced price over the years, and a lot of that, I think, we're going to have to say would be on the preventive side."

Preventive medicine, along with health care, could help Garcia and millions more.

"I'm glad [this is in the works] because there are so many people that don't have it, and if it happens, it will be the work of angels," Garcia said.