Aaron Regunberg: Be Fair to Those Who Care
Friday, March 16, 2012
Have you ever visited a family member or friend living in a nursing home? My best friend’s grandfather, who lived with my friend’s family and whom I became quite close to as a child, was moved into a nursing home when I was in middle school. I went with my friend to visit Pops (that’s what he went by) a few times. Needless to say, it was always a strange experience to see him in such a different environment than how I was used to picturing him.
But my most vivid memories of those visits—what stuck out to me the most during my times in that nursing home—were not my interactions with Pops, but rather my observations of the nursing staff taking care of him. It really struck me how hard they worked, and how difficult their jobs were. Serving Pops, cleaning him, taking care of his physical problems, dealing with his unpleasant bodily substances, and just being there for him and maintaining that relationship at a time he really needed it (which I can’t imagine was easy—Pops was a wonderful man but, bless his heart, with the onset of dementia he lost a lot of his filter and could be inappropriate and sometimes borderline sexist or racist towards the home’s employees). But the nurses and CNAs working there never stopped caring for him, and so many others, day in and day out, striving through thick and thin to make the end of Pops’ life as pleasant and pain free as they possibly could.
These memories were on my mind recently when I heard about the contract dispute currently involving caretakers at two Rhode Island nursing and rehabilitation facilities, one in Greenville and one in Pawtucket, run by the Genesis HealthCare Corporation. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to look into the issue further if not for my recollections of Pops’ caretakers. But I’m glad I did learn more about the situation, because what is happening over in Greenville and Pawtucket is truly shocking.
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To make a long story short, the Genesis HealthCare Corporation is attempting to impose a new healthcare plan that would expose its workers to up to $11,000 a year in healthcare costs. Yes, you read that correctly—$11,000 a year! (For family coverage, it breaks down to $5,000 in premiums; $1,000 in deductibles; and $6,000 out-of-pocket responsibility for major medical incidents like hospitalization.)
Now, an increase of this proportion would be a major burden on any Rhode Island family. But we’re talking about nurses and CNAs who—despite the important service they provide and the strenuous nature of their work—are making less than $30,000 per year. Many families are barely making ends meet as is, and it goes without saying that $11,000 a year in healthcare costs is plainly and simply unaffordable for them. What Genesis HealthCare Corporation is demanding, effectively, is that these folks who spend every day providing quality healthcare to Rhode Island’s seniors do not deserve to have quality healthcare for their own families.
Of course, one might argue that maybe Genesis had no choice. It’s a tough economy, they’re nervous about reimbursements, so they had to change things up, right? Unfortunately for this theory, the facts make clear that the Genesis HealthCare Corporation has more than enough resources to provide a decent healthcare plan for its employees. First of all, Genesis isn’t some local, community-based company that—like many small businesses in Rhode Island—is struggling with its bottom line. Genesis HealthCare Corporation is a billion-dollar plus, for-profit nursing home operator. It’s an LLC, meaning its structured through a complicated maze of limited liability and holding corporations owned by private investors whose overwhelming goal, like so many on Wall St., is to make the biggest profit possible to the exclusion of all other motivations.
The company, which apparently has enough resources to fuel its continuous and constant expansion, now owns and operates more than 200 facilities in 13 states, seven of which are in RI (they received over $35 million in reimbursements from the State of Rhode Island last year). Oh, and one more thing—because of course we wouldn’t want this billion-dollar corporation to have to abide by the same regulations and rates that every other struggling RI small business has to follow, every component of Genesis’s corporate web is registered in Delaware.
Increasing Profits
It should be clear, then, that the Genesis HealthCare Corporation is trying to force vastly increased healthcare costs on its workers not because the company doesn’t have the resources to do otherwise, but because Genesis wants to further increase its investors’ profits. And while this deal may mean a slightly larger windfall for the hedge funds behind the Genesis curtain, it’s easy to imagine the damaging effects it will have here in Rhode Island: first, on the company’s hardworking employees, many of whom would be forced into bankruptcy under this plan the moment something medically serious were to happen to them or their children; and second, on residents of Genesis’ nursing and rehabilitation homes, the quality of whose care will undoubtedly suffer in response to increased staff turnover rates resulting from these changes.
Fortunately for workers and residents, Genesis’ nurses and CNAs are fighting back against this corporate greed, and last week they voted 140 to 7 to reject the corporation’s plan. Unfortunately, Genesis has decided to resort to blatant employee-intimidation tactics to scare their workers into accepting their unfair deal. The corporation actually took out ads in the Pawtucket Times and the Valley Breeze (I guess they’re not so hard up they can’t afford this paid advertising) to promote job fairs that management held inside the nursing and rehabilitation homes. The message they’re sending to employees—many of whom have worked in these facilities for decades—is clear: submit to Genesis’ clearly unaffordable demands, or get ready to be fired.
It may sound cheesy, but I have trouble hearing the story of this callous treatment without thinking back on Pops and those committed caretakers who helped him during his waning years. The nursing and rehabilitation facilities involved in this contract dispute are full of folks with the same stories, seniors who deserve the best possible care and caretakers who deserve, after spending years and years offering healthcare to other families, to be able to provide healthcare to their own loved ones. That doesn’t seem to be asking too much, and I think we all have a responsibility to join the side of justice in this dispute. If you agree with me, here’s a simple action step you can take in less than a minute to make your voice heard—call Richard Blinn, the President of Genesis HealthCare in New England, at (978) 474-7500, and leave him a simple message.
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