Dive Brief:
- Protesting what they claim to be sub-par care, 2,600 members of the California chapter of the National Union of Healthcare Workers will begin a statewide strike against Kaiser Permanente's facilities on January 12, according to a press release on the union's website. Psychologists, therapists and social workers will be joined by more than 700 other workers in what the union claims will be the largest mental health worker strike in US history.
- In a Q&A posted on its site, the union wrote, "Despite record profits, Kaiser does not staff its psychiatry departments with enough clinicians to treat the ever growing number of patients seeking mental health care. Kaiser's systemic understaffing forces patients to endure lengthy and illegal waits for treatment. For patients suffering from depression, anxiety, and other debilitating mental conditions, these delays can be insurmountable obstacles, sometimes leading to tragic outcomes, even suicides."
- In 2013, Kaiser was fined $4 million by the California Department of Managed Health Care for mental health violations. The agency found that many Kaiser patients seeking mental health services were forced to wait for weeks.
Dive Insight:
Kaiser seems to have stonewalled patients and clinicians on this issue for four years by refusing to acknowledge the problems, much less fix them. Having exhausted every other means of forcing Kaiser to correct the problems, Kaiser's mental health clinicians are hoping that calling a strike will bring public attention to the crisis and hold Kaiser accountable for providing the timely, appropriate mental health care its members pay for and that Kaiser is required by law to provide.
This is far from the first time Kaiser has been caught up in a mental healthcare mess. Back in 2006, Kaiser was forced to pay serious civil penalties for patient dumping—literally taking mentally ill patients for whom they had no room and dropping them off in a part of town known as Skid Row, a gathering place for the homeless. That was nine years ago, and to hear the union talk about it, the situation at Kaiser is not that much better.
In the age of union-busting political games, it really takes a lot for a union to vote yes on a strike, let alone a statewide strike in a behemoth like California. What makes this news particularly compelling is that the union isn't striking for better pay, better working conditions or more paid vacation days. It is striking to take a stand on what it reports is a long track record of understaffed wards, leading to severely substandard patient care, union leaders say.
The union isn't stopping with the strike, either. It has called for a federal investigation into the rate increase Kaiser has requested from regulators. It claims that Kaiser does not take profits into consideration when calculating premiums, which makes their request for a 4.1% increase in premiums look a little greedy when balanced against the fact that Kaiser has made more than $14.5 billion since 2009 and its 2014 profits are up 40% over last year’s record.
Stay tuned—this controversy isn't going away anytime soon.