Frustrated Kaiser Permanente mental health care workers, approaching six months on strike, staged what they called a “die in” on the front steps of the company’s San Diego administration building in Grantville on Tuesday.
Falling to the ground en masse, the group remained still and silent for three minutes as San Diego police continued to block vehicle access to Orcutt Avenue, an access route near Friars and Mission Gorge roads that runs behind Kaiser’s Zion Medical Center.
The demonstration, said union steward and licensed clinical social worker Josh Garcia, was designed to symbolize the increased risk of suicide that workers believe has been incurred during the long strike. Workers, he said, are confident that Kaiser mental health care patients in Southern California are not getting seen as quickly as they should be.
“We’re representing that we need to be able to see patients within the standard of care — within one week,” Garcia said.
The National Union of Healthcare Workers, the organization staging strikes throughout Southern California, taking an estimated 2,400 workers to the picket lines since Oct. 21, accuses Kaiser of “illegally putting patients on 30-day appointment waitlists,” of “making patients wait up to 44 weeks for autism assessments,” of canceling group therapy appointments for thousands of patients and of “sending patients with severe mental health conditions to outside provider networks that aren’t capable of treating them.”
But Kaiser denies those accusations, insisting that “patients in crisis get care 24/7, those with urgent needs can get appointments within 48 hours, and patients seeking nonurgent care are offered an appointment within 6 days, on average.”
NUHW has been accusing Kaiser of harming patients since before the strike started, but it’s difficult for the public to judge just how dire the situation is for those with mental health care needs.
The state Department of Managed Healthcare is charged with overseeing all managed care health plans in California, and a big part of its job is making sure that medical providers are backing the policies they sell with enough resources to meet demand.
A DMHC spokesperson said in an email Tuesday that the agency has received a total of 92 calls and 46 written complaints since the strike started, however, nearly six months in, there has been no public statement indicating whether such complaints were factual.
“The DMHC is looking into all information and complaints shared by NUHW as part of the enforcement investigation, which is ongoing,” the DMHC statement said. “Enforcement investigations are confidential pursuant to federal and state laws.
“When the investigation is complete, the Department will take all appropriate action based on evidence.”
The department’s enforcement actions database, available online, lists no penalties or other documents related to strike allegations.
Planning and preparation time remains a sticking point. NUHW statements have demanded seven hours per week, the amount that is said to be provided to Kaiser’s mental health workers in Northern California. Kaiser says in a “current offer” page on its website that it is now offering seven hours per week with five of those hours “guaranteed.”
“Kaiser is proposed to only guarantee five hours per week, while therapists in Southern California earlier this month reduced their request to six hours per week,” a union statement said.
Workers marching Tuesday also decried their lack of a defined-benefit pension similar to the one enjoyed by their fellow workers in Northern California.
“Kaiser mental health workers without a pension will receive nearly $2 million less in retirement dollars than Kaiser employees who still have pension,” the union statement says.
Kaiser insists that its Southern California mental health workers do receive pensions, though they are of the defined contribution variety for anyone hired after Jan. 1, 2015. As the U.S. Department of Labor explains, defined benefit plans guarantee “a specified monthly benefit at retirement,” whereas common 401(k) plans are examples of those that define contributions with an employer matching their employees’ savings up to a specified percentage. Kaiser would contribute 6% of an employee’s pay to a retirement plan “whether or not eligible employees contribute to their plan” and also matches employee contributions up to 3% of pay.
Wages are another area of disagreement. The union says that its striking members’ wages are up to 40 percent lower than comparable workers in the health care market. Kaiser says its wage offer is competitive with pay increases of 5% in the first and second years of the proposed four-year contract and increases of 4.5% in the third and fourth years.
Workers on strike are living without pay at the moment, and many, such as licensed marriage and family therapist Kortney Diesel, said that continuing to hold out has been an increasing financial struggle.
Workers, she said, are doing what they can to make ends meet, even if it means giving literally a little more of themselves.
“I was donating plasma for weeks until I wasn’t able to do that anymore,” Diesel said. “It has been almost six months, so I don’t think we’re stopping the fight now.”
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