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Quarter Century of Compassion
Medicine (1997-2005)
Tzu Chi in the USA
1989 – 2014

ith the high cost of health insurance in the United States, and
the high out-of-pocket costs incurred even for those with basic
Wcoverage, access to affordable medical care has long been a
major problem for many Americans. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, roughly 15 percent of Americans,
or approximately forty million individuals, went without insurance every
year.
A couple of years after Tzu Chi’s first free clinic was established in
Alhambra, California, volunteers in Hawaii established a free clinic in
their Honolulu office in May 1997. At first, the clinic was open twice a
week to give uninsured, low-income patients an opportunity to see
the doctor. In May 2000, a new location allowed the clinic to expand its
services, with medical professionals providing services in pediatric care,
gynecology, internal medicine, surgery, ophthalmology, and cardiology
five days a week. Medical resources are often hard to come by on remote
Pacific islands, so the Hawaii clinic team began traveling to other islands
to provide care through medical outreaches. This included two major
outreaches on American Samoa in 1998 and 2003, as well as an outreach
in Chuuk, a state of Micronesia, after it was hit by Typhoon Chataan in
2002.
The Tzu Chi Northeast Regional Office in Flushing, New York,
established a partnership with Elmhurst Hospital Center, so that beginning
on September 13, 1997, Elmhurst’s mobile medical van parked in front
of the Tzu Chi office each Saturday to provide diagnoses and various
health checkups to patients, many of whom were day laborers or part-
time workers without medical insurance. In 2003, the regional office and
Elmhurst expanded their partnership, establishing the Tzu Chi-Elmhurst
Hospital Family Health Center in downtown Flushing.
In 1994, not long after Tzu Chi Free Clinic opened in Alhambra,
medical volunteers began holding community health outreach events.
Building on this experience, they held their first major outreach in 1998
in rural San Bernardino County, serving 636 farm workers and their family
members and beginning a pattern of following the seasonal migration
of farm workers to better provide them with healthcare. As they did so,
Tzu Chi’s medical care expanded from Southern California to the Central
Valley and eventually all the way up to Northern California, sparking
new medical teams in both areas. Beginning in February 1998, medical
volunteers also accompanied the disaster relief team from Taiwan to

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