Nurses buy – and forgive – $2.6 million in medical debt for Minnesotans

June 19, 2017 by

MNA President Mary Turner (L) and Executive Director Rose Roach rip up medical debt for 1,800 Minnesotans.

Twin Cities community members overwhelmingly supported Allina nurses during their historic strike last year. Today, members of the Minnesota Nurses Association offered a thank-you gift for that support, purchasing and forgiving the past-due accounts of 1,800 families facing a combined $2.6 million in medical debt.

MNA, a union of more than 20,000 registered nurses, located and acquired the accounts with help from RIP Medical Debt, a New York-based non-profit. Like a collection agency, the organization buys medical debt at a fraction of its value.

Rather than aggressively pursuing the debt it purchased, though, MNA immediately forgave it.

“Nurses are happy to allow these families to be free of their debt,” MNA President Mary Turner said. “They’ve had this medical debt hanging over their heads for two years or more.  It’s cost them their credit, pushed them toward bankruptcy and hurt them in so many ways.”

MNA paid $28,000 for the $2.6 million balance.

Names and other details regarding the forgiven accounts will remain private, but one Minnesotan struggling to pay down medical debt, Debra Puchala, agreed to tell her story during a press conference at MNA’s headquarters in St. Paul this morning.

Debra Puchala speaks about her battle to get out of medical debt. (MNA photos by Chris Reinke)

After undergoing hip replacement surgery in September 2015 and shoulder surgery the following year, Puchala owes various medical providers more than $5,000.

“The bills kept coming,” she said. “When you have surgery, you know, you get more than one bill, and … everybody wants their money right away. I was told that I was going too slow.”

One of her six bills wound up in collection, and as a result, Puchala said, “I can’t make a regular medical appointment. I have to go to either urgent care or, if it gets bad, emergency.”

In January 2017, faced with the prospect of tacking on another $5,000 to her debt load before reaching the insurance plan’s deductible, Puchala dropped out of her physical therapy regimen, and she continues to put off knee replacement surgery, she said, “because I can’t take on the debt.”

MNA has long derided the U.S. health care system for forcing patients like Puchala into consumer decisions that pit their wellness against their other needs, like food and rent.

Medical debt is the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. Past due accounts to health care providers are cited in 62 percent of bankruptcy cases, and bad debt to medical providers is expected to top $200 billion by 2019.

“Medical bills are now the No. 1 reason people are contacted by debt collectors,” Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said at the MNA press conference. “Even people with health insurance face unpaid medical bills due to the very high deductibles in many insurance policies.

“The Minnesota Nurses Association is generous to have relieved people from the weight of this debt.”

The union was inspired to acquire Minnesotans’ medical debt after several members watched a report on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” about RIP Medical Debt.

“We’d had many discussions about how to repay the community for what they gave nurses during the strike,” Turner said. “The John Oliver show inspired us, and we decided to see if we could do the same thing. MNA is grateful to RIP Medical Debt for helping us make this happen.”

About 5,000 MNA members who work at Abbott Northwestern, Mercy, United and Unity hospitals and Phillips Eye Institute spent nearly a month and a half on the picket line last year in a campaign to keep their high-quality health insurance, improve workplace safety and protect patients from staffing shortages.

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On 37th day of strike, nurses reach tentative agreement with Allina Health

October 11, 2016 by
Nurses picket outside United Hospital during an open-ended strike that began at five Allina Health facilities in the Twin Cities on Labor Day.

Nurses picket outside United Hospital during an open-ended strike that began at five Allina Health facilities on Labor Day.

Striking nurses will take down picket lines outside five Twin Cities facilities tonight after their bargaining team reached a tentative agreement with Allina Health on a three-year contract early this morning.

Nurses will take a ratification vote Thursday. Their approval would trigger a separate agreement, also reached during overnight talks hosted by Gov. Mark Dayton and Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, regarding a return to work for 4,700 union members who began an open-ended strike on Labor Day.

Unlike a contract proposal voted down earlier this month, the new tentative agreement comes with a unanimous recommendation from nurses’ bargaining team, according to a press release issued by their union, the Minnesota Nurses Association.

“The agreement is the result of an enormous amount of work,” MNA Executive Director Rose Roach said, crediting Allina nurses for showing “remarkable strength and courage” in their fight for a fair contract.

By sticking together and keeping the heat on Allina and its not-for-profit board members, nurses were able to make gains on two of their top priorities in bargaining – staffing and workplace safety.

And while they agreed to phase out their preferred, union-sponsored health insurance plans by 2018, nurses finally extracted a guarantee from Allina that their benefits under the provider’s “core” insurance plan will not diminish through 2021.

Nurses also forced Allina to compensate them in exchange for giving up their preferred insurance plans. They secured additional contributions in four of the next five years to tax-advantaged health spending accounts that, Roach said, “will ease their transition from their contract health insurance plans to Allina core plans.

“Nurses have cooperated with easing out of these plans and deserve to be protected through any future benefit reductions by Allina Health, which the company has provided.”

Additionally, the tentative agreement calls for wage increases of 2 percent in all three years of the contract, around-the-clock security postings in the hospitals’ emergency rooms and creation of three labor-management bodies to give nurses a greater voice over health insurance benefits, workplace safety and staffing.

Nurses have pushed hard for Allina to reign in the practice of assigning patients to charge nurses in its facilities. In the tentative agreement, Allina agrees it is “essential” to give charge nurses time to manage workflow, serve as a resource to staff and assist with unanticipated changes in patients’ status.

A Charge Nurse Assignment Task Force created by the pending contract would seek to “review units and shifts where charge nurses are regularly assigned full or partial patient assignments,” and it includes a provision for mediation if members of the task force are unable to agree on whether patient assignments are appropriate in a given unit.

Click here to review the tentative agreement on the nurses’ website.

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Bobby Kasper: Solidarity is alive and thriving in St. Paul

October 6, 2016 by
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Delegates to the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, adjourned their meeting early Sept. 14 to join striking Allina nurses on the picket line outside United Hospital.

 

Last month at the East Side Freedom Library, I joined a roundtable discussion with historians, artists, trade unionists and community activists on the subject of solidarity. It was a lively, challenging and essential dialogue, and it served as another reminder of how fortunate we are in St. Paul to have a space like the Freedom Library – a union hall for the whole community.

Our conversation that night reflected on struggles from our past in which working people used solidarity to get justice. There have been many examples, as any history buff knows, including the 1934 Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis, which saw union, non-union and unemployed workers standing together on the picket line. Using solidarity, they broke the powerful alliance of employers that had so effectively blocked workers in a range of industries from bargaining for a better life.

We’ve seen solidarity work in a global context, too. When NAFTA unleashed a race to the bottom among manufacturers in the mid-1990s, Autoworkers from St. Paul reached out across the border to workers inside Ford Motor Company’s Mexico assembly plants, building a unique relationship and bearing witness to the poverty wages and poor working conditions there.

But we don’t need to look backward to see the power of solidarity. It’s thriving right here, right now in St. Paul.

Our City Council last month passed an ordinance to guarantee all workers access to earned sick and safe time – the strongest and most progressive of any municipality in the country. It was a victory for working people – in particular, working people of color – but it didn’t happen by accident. Labor unions and small businesses teamed up with worker centers, community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and religious organizations like ISAIAH. We worked together, in solidarity, to make earned sick time a priority, to make our voices heard and, eventually, to make history.

Solidarity is alive and well on Allina nurses’ picket lines as well. The St. Paul Labor Center serves as a strike hub for nurses at United Hospital, and every day I come into work, I’m inspired by the members of the Minnesota Nurses Association – young and old, from a wide range of backgrounds – who are standing together and refusing to give in as Allina attempts to break their union. And it warms my heart to see so many members of other unions joining these courageous nurses on the picket line and supporting their strike fund financially.

As long as it takes to get the contract they deserve, that’s how long we’ll stand with nurses in their fight. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what nurses would do if it were any of us out on a picket line. It’s what solidarity is all about.

– Bobby Kasper is president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, which unites more than 100 affiliate unions representing 50,000 working people – and publishes The St. Paul Union Advocate.

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Nurses take over street outside Allina board member’s St. Paul office (photos)

October 5, 2016 by

web-allina-securian-2Striking nurses poured into the streets of downtown St. Paul today and joined a boisterous, traffic-snarling rally outside Securian Center, the high-rise building that houses Allina Health board member David Kuplic’s offices.

Kuplic, a senior vice president at Securian, refused to meet with a delegation of nurses who entered the high-rise office building at 4th Street and Robert, prompting chants of “Where’s Dave Kuplic?” from hundreds of nurses in the street outside.

An employee in Securian’s public relations department told nurses he would pass their message along to Kuplic, United Hospital nurse Jennifer Michelson said. “But he wanted to know why we felt there was impact on Securian.”

Here’s whyallina-board-numbers_Layout 1. Securian is one of a handful of investment firms and corporations, including General Mills and Buffalo Wild Wings, whose executives dominate Allina Health’s not-for-profit board. Striking nurses are hoping public pressure will prompt those board members to reconsider management’s hard-line approach to contract negotiations.

It’s an approach that is costing the not-for-profit health provider tens of millions of dollars each week the nurses are on strike – costs that already have eclipsed the concessions Allina wants from its nurses in contract negotiations. Mercy Hospital mental health nurse Julie Anderson said leaders who would invest in union busting over community care have no place on a charitable board.

“Why do we have all these financial (executives) on a non-profit board of directors?” Anderson asked. “What do they know about health care?”

 

The nurses originally intended to stage the demonstration outside RiverCentre, where Allina CEO Dr. Penny Wheeler was to join a panel discussion on health care costs. But Wheeler backed out at the last minute, prompting nurses to seek out Kuplic instead.

About 4,700 members of the Minnesota Nurses Association employed at five Allina facilities in the Twin Cities have been on strike since Labor Day, their second strike of 2016. They voted Monday to reject the provider’s most recent contract proposal, saying it did not do enough to contain health insurance costs or address safety-related staffing concerns.

The vote result means the strike will continue indefinitely. Click here for a list of ways to support nurses in their fight for a fair contract.

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Striking nurses weigh contract proposal in advance of voting Monday

September 30, 2016 by
MNA spokesperson Angela Becchetti, a nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, talks with media about Allina's most recent proposal to striking nurses.

MNA spokesperson Angela Becchetti, a nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, talks with media about Allina’s most recent proposal to striking nurses.

Striking nurses will vote Monday on a three-year contract proposal from Allina that makes some gains on staffing and safety – two of their top issues – but wasn’t good enough to win a recommendation from the union’s bargaining team.

Nurses fought tooth and nail with Allina over the course of mediated talks this week that spanned three days but “felt much longer than that,” United Hospital nurse and bargaining team member Bunny Engeldorf said at a press conference in Minneapolis today.

“It was not easy to leave that table,” she added, without a tentative agreement they could recommend, but all 15 members of the bargaining team agreed Allina nurses deserve an opportunity to vote.

Angela Becchetti, a nurse at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and union spokesperson, said negotiators are “confident nurses will make the best informed decision come Monday.”

More than 4,000 members of the Minnesota Nurses Association have been on strike at five Allina facilities in the Twin Cities area since Labor Day.

Voting Monday will take place at four locations close to the picket lines outside United Hospital in St. Paul, Abbott Northwestern and Phillips Eye Institute in Minneapolis, Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids and Unity Hospital in Fridley. Nurses already are able to review the 41-page contract proposal, and the union will hold several meetings to answer questions and discuss the terms.

In talks that began Tuesday, nurses were finally able to get Allina to address their staffing concerns. The provider agreed to establish a labor-management team to evaluate whether charge nurses should be assigned patients. Combined with provisions to improve nurses’ safety on the job, the staffing language represents some progress on “what we wanted this contract to address,” Engeldorf said.

Allina’s top priority in contract negotiations, which began in February, was eliminating nurses’ preferred, quality health insurance plans and moving them into the provider’s corporate plans.

Nurses eventually relented, but they continued to fight for language assuring their benefits would not diminish over the course of the contract. They came away with a partial victory, negotiators said, noting that it was an improvement on what Allina offered in talks before the strike began.

MNA Executive Director Rose Roach said bargaining issues with Allina felt “like dealing with molasses,” and she credited the 15 members of the union’s bargaining team for having “pushed as far as they could.”

If a majority votes to reject the proposal Monday, the strike will continue. If members vote to accept, union leaders and Allina will begin discussing how the 4,000-plus strikers return to work.

Until the two sides reach a settlement, picket lines will stay up, and union negotiators were quick to dispel any notion that nurses would begin crossing the line before then. Striking nurses are set to lose their employer-provided health insurance tomorrow.

“Allina thinks Oct. 1 is a deadline for their nurses,” Becchetti said. “It’s not. We’re calling it Red October. We’ll be out here in full force.”

Regardless of how the vote goes, one thing is already clear: The relationship between Allina Health and its nurses is at an all-time low.

“The level of disrespect they have shown for their greatest ally, the nurses, has cost them something that can’t be put on a balance sheet,” Roach said.

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Insurance plan trustee advises members ‘go elsewhere for care’ during Allina strike

September 22, 2016 by
web.AllinaStrikeDay1-5

Nurses picket outside United Hospital in St. Paul, one of five Allina Health facilities where members of MNA have been on strike since Labor Day.

The president of a major Minnesota union sent a letter this week to members enrolled in its health insurance plans urging them to “go elsewhere for health care” during the Allina strike.

Jennifer Christensen, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, cited concerns about “quality control” and patient safety at five Allina Health facilities in the Twin Cities where members of the Minnesota Nurses Association have been on strike since Sept. 5: Abbott Northwestern, Mercy, United and Unity hospitals and Phillips Eye Institute.

[Click here to view the full letter.]

As it did during nurses’ seven-day strike in June, Allina has contracted replacement nurses from across the country to fill in for the 4,700 union members who regularly staff its facilities. The changeover was rocky in June, prompting patients and hospital staff to file about 40 complaints with state regulators, according to MNA.

Christensen, who serves as a trustee of two multi-employer health insurance plans that cover 7,000 people, questioned whether replacement nurses could uphold the high standards set by union nurses, or whether Allina’s facilities have “become so overwhelmed with so many new replacement nurses that quality care is no longer guaranteed.”

Local 1189 leaders say they plan to invite other unions that sponsor Taft Hartley plans to join them in advising members to consider alternatives to Allina until the provider gets serious about negotiating with its nurses.

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Laser focused on cutting health care, Allina turns deaf ear to nurses’ safety concerns

September 15, 2016 by
Abbott Northwestern nurse and MNA spokesperson Angel Becchetti speaks at a press conference on nurses' safety proposals.

Abbott Northwestern nurse and MNA spokesperson Angela Becchetti calls on Allina to respond to nurses’ proposals to improve their safety on the job.

 

When Celeste Kopacek’s patient in the neuroscience unit at Abbott Northwestern Hospital told her he was going home to get his gun and would come back to find her, she reported the threat to Allina security.

“They told me to call back if he showed up,” Kopacek said.

Since contract negotiations with Allina began in February, nurses at five metro-area Allina facilities have made several proposals aimed at improving their safety on the job.

Erinn Olson (L) and Celeste Kopacek display a partial list of the attacks Kopacek has suffered while working as an Abbott nurse.

Erinn Olson (L) and Celeste Kopacek display a partial list of the attacks Kopacek has suffered while working as an Abbott nurse.

Allina has refused to respond to those proposals, nurses said at press conference today outside Abbott Northwestern. Instead, the not-for-profit corporation has focused almost exclusively on slashing nurses’ health insurance.

“We’ve made a compromise on their issue,” Abbott Northwestern nurse Angela Becchetti said, referencing steep concessions nurses accepted in last-ditch negotiations before beginning their open-ended strike Sept. 5. “They haven’t made a compromise on ours.”

Nurses want a heightened security presence in their facilities to reduce response times when patients become violent or dangerous. Nurses have seen an uptick in such incidents over the last 10 years, in part, because of untreated mental illness, opioid addiction and other substance-abuse issues.

Nurses also want Allina to provide counseling and paid time off to nurses who are victims of violent incidents, as well as more training in how to diffuse them before they begin.

“We need more than two hours of training,” said Erinn Olson, Kopacek’s colleague in the Abbott neuroscience unit.

About 4,700 Allina nurses are on strike at Abbott Northwestern, United, Unity and Mercy hospitals, as well as Phillips Eye Institute.

“Every single one of them has at least five stories,” Kopacek said, of being attacked or threatened on the job. “To not feel safe at work is unacceptable.”

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