When life-saving surgery comes with a devastating financial cost, patients and their families face an often-overlooked crisis: financial toxicity. Drawing from patient stories and global surgery research, this talk explores how surgical care can push people into financial hardship—and what we can do to ensure that no one goes bankrupt for the care they need. Jade Tso is a medical student at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, where she is a part of the Academic Research Careers for Medical Doctors (ARC-MD) Program and the UC Davis Center for Global Surgery. She is a Paul Farmer Research Collaborator at the Harvard Program in Global Surgery and Social Change. As an undergraduate at Duke University, she initiated a community-based nutrition project in Argentina. She spent 6 years organizing with the grassroots advocacy arm of Partners in Health and served on the National Steering Committee. After college, Jade began working at Advance Access & Delivery as the Zero Tuberculosis Initiative’s Data for Action Fellow before acting as Program Manager. While in medical school, Jade has served as the co-director at Paul Hom Asian Clinic, a student-run clinic for low-income and uninsured Asian immigrants in Sacramento. As a former American Medical Women’s Association Global Health Fellow (2021-2023) and Alpha Omega Alpha Student Research Fellow, Jade worked on a pilot project implementing a stomach cancer screening program and assessing barriers to care for endoscopy in Roatan, Honduras. In her research year, she is studying financial toxicity among cancer surgery patients in Northern Thailand. An aspiring “attorney for the poor” and global surgeon, Jade is passionate about framing healthcare as a human right and proving that high standards of care can be provided in low-resource settings. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx