Hortensia Magaña, 70; executive who helped build her family's corporation was also advocate for Latino workers
Long after she transformed herself from a blue-collar worker into vice president of Diana's Mexican Food Products, her family's $30-million corporation, Hortensia Magaña remained concerned with the fate of the working class.
When she learned that hospitals routinely charged the uninsured more than those covered by insurance companies, Magaña launched a battle to eliminate the inequity. As chairwoman of the consumer group Consejo de Latinos Unidos, Magaña helped spark a congressional inquiry, and her work ultimately resulted in lower healthcare prices for many uninsured workers.
Magaña died of cancer July 1 at her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, the family announced. She was 70.
"Mrs. Magaña helped negotiate the settlement that ended up changing hospital pricing from coast to coast; it shook the industry," said Kevin "K.B." Forbes, executive director of Consejo de Latinos Unidos. "She gave a voice to the voiceless: the working poor, immigrants, people who were like her back in the 1960s."
In 1999 she wrote a Times commentary advocating a tax credit that would "permit millions of Latinos -- and many others who share our predicament -- to have access to preventive and routine health care."
"Latinos are the fastest-growing population group in America, and we believe our interests are America's interests," Magaña wrote.
With Consejo de Latinos Unidos, she helped coordinate the filing of several lawsuits by patients against Tenet Healthcare in 2003. The group alleged that uninsured patients were charged as much as five times more than hospitals charged insurance companies for the same services.
Magaña and Forbes hashed out a settlement with Tenet that included what Forbes called a "fair hospital pricing policy for the uninsured," which is now common in the industry.
"Mrs. Magaña . . . did things quietly," Forbes said. "Everything was to help working-class people."
Born in the state of Durango, Mexico, on Nov. 10, 1937, Magaña was the oldest girl in a family of 12 children. Her father owned a ranch and ran a store in the town of Nombre de Dios.
Magaña moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s. She worked at a Mexican food company, where she met the man who would become her husband -- Samuel Magaña -- and at Teledyne, an aerospace firm. But her mind was on the marketplace, and soon she found a niche.
