Last week, over 200 nurses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn took to the streets over their health insurance.
The Interfaith Medical Center has felt the wrath of members of the New York State Nurses Association, who are collectively demanding that hospital managers reinstate a health insurance plan the hospital ended by stopping payments. The center stopped paying into the NYSNA Benefits Fund health insurance plan last August, forcing some union members to pay their entire health care costs out of pocket.
The NYSNA has over 37,000 members. It’s New York’s largest professional association and union for registered nurses. It represents registered nurses and some all-professional bargaining units in the states of New York and New Jersey.
“We are outraged by management’s decision to leave nurses and their families without health care coverage,” said NYSNA representative Elaine Charpentier last week. “The only acceptable solution is to reinstate the health benefits for these families immediately.”
According to the NYSNA, the hospital promised they’d cover costs and reimburse for out-of-pocket expenses, but no payments have been made yet.
Mike Hertz, an NYSNA representative in negotiations with Interfaith, spoke to the AmNews right before a meeting on Tuesday. He talked about confronting Interfaith’s people at the negotiating table once they found out about the stalled payments.
“We confronted them at the negotiation table [and said], ‘How dare you have the nurses without any health insurance?’ What they did do on November 10 was that they paid about $563,000 to the benefits. However, there’s still a remainder of $553,000 [left to be paid].
“When your lights are off and you show up with half the bill to Con Edison, your lights stay off,” said Hertz.
Under the new contract, the union hopes to balance goals with practicality by preserving pensions and benefits, addressing staffing issues and providing for competitive wage increases while recognizing that the hospital is located in a ZIP code with one of the highest poverty rates in the entire nation and is in the middle of a tough economic situation due to the redesign of Medicaid and Medicare.
According to the Interfaith Medical Center’s website, the hospital provides a wide range of medical, surgical, gynecological, dental, psychiatric, pediatric and other services throughout Central Brooklyn, and they operate in “a newly modernized hospital with 287 beds and ambulatory care network of 16 clinics stretching across the Central Brooklyn communities of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.” Now, the NYSNA would like the hospital to care for their employees like they claim to care for their patients.
However, if negotiations stall around health insurance, would that mean a possible strike by NYSNA? “Nurses without health insurance is a strike issue,” said Hertz. “Other facilities have taken votes to strike for less.”