NUHW members in Hawai’i are $1,500 richer this month because they found an error in how Kaiser Permanente calculated their performance bonus.
As part of their first contract, which they won through a 172-day strike, the mental health professionals get to negotiate which metrics are taken into account in calculating their performance bonus that can be worth up to $5,000.
Kaiser dragged its feet on the bonus this year, but after a lot of prodding, it sent out $3,500 checks to NUHW members at the end of May, claiming that they had only partially met their goal of seeing patients within seven days after being hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.
That didn’t sit well with a vigilant Kaiser therapist who reviewed Kaiser’s data and realized the HMO hadn’t analyzed it correctly.
The performance metric was supposed to be based only on patients who have private Kaiser insurance — not patients who have Kaiser through Medicaid or Medicare. But Kaiser’s figures were based on all patients, including those who have Kaiser through public health plans.
The therapist crunched the numbers and realized that when only patients with private Kaiser insurance were taken into account, she and her colleagues had fully achieved the performance metric and should have received the full $5,000 bonus.
She took her findings to stewards, who raised the issue with Kaiser. It didn’t take long for the HMO to acknowledge its mistake and agree to pay the full performance bonus.
“The lesson is that it behooves us to scrutinize all the data that comes from management,” said Rachel Kaya, a psychologist at Kaiser on Maui. “Clearly we can’t always trust what they offer us.”
“It’s really more about the principle,” Kaya added. “I don’t know if it was on purpose or incompetence, but don’t screw us. And, if they do screw us, now we have a contract. We have teeth now. We didn’t used to have that.”
