Conglomerates milk the health industry
1986Hayden Perry 1986-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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Patients' health is being endangered and medical workers' jobs are being destroyed conglomerate in Oakland, Calif. Health America runs medical clinics in 19 states as a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). This is a system in which members pay a monthly fee that covers their medical costs when they need care.
Twenty-six thousand people are enrolled in this health plan in Oakland. Thirteen thousand of them are cared for at the North Oakland Clinic at a monthly fee of $85. Workers at the clinic are members of the Hospital and Institutional Workers Union, Local 250—affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Doctors are also paid employees of Health America. While this system has been profitable, Health America wants still more profits.
On Aug. 1 they announced that the North Oakland clinic would be closed in 30 days, its employees laid off, and its patients scattered under a plan known as "capitation." Under this system Health America members still pay the conglomerate $85 a month but they are "sold" to various groups of doctors who treat them for a fixed fee. By getting doctors to compete for the contracts, Health America has reduced the rate they pay them to about $30 a member a month.
Thus, Health America gets over half the member's fee for little more than a bookkeeping operation. Contract doctors are expected to make a profit on the remaining $30. This fast-food-type franchising process will result in doctors paring their costs to the bone, three-minute "examinations" of sick patients, and a minimum of tests.
The union is the first fatality under doctors, patients, and medical workers all the harder to turn a profit.
To counter this trend to unfeeling corporate medicine, union members are demanding that the union be included in the negotiations between Health America and the doctors' groups in order to protect the rights of union members and patients. They are also demanding that Health America and the bidding doctors' groups sign a statement agreeing to respect the union contract and to renegotiate in good faith when it expires in February 1987.
While opposing capitation, the union insists, if it does take place, that Health America should deal with only one doctors' group instead of splitting its patients up between competing groups.
Winning these demands, which are in the interest of both workers and patients, will take the joint efforts of the labor movement and all those concerned with our health care.