A majority of California legislators have signed onto nearly identical letters calling on Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams to the nine-week mental health strike in Southern California by returning to the bargaining table and agreeing to NUHW’s proposals for settlement.
Citing NUHW research about Kaiser canceling individual and group therapy sessions at “an alarming rate” during the strike, as well as Kaiser’s most recent citation from California regulators for deficient mental health services, the legislative leaders urged Adams to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW as soon as possible, and to agree to the union’s reasonable contract proposals to ensure the delivery of timely and appropriate behavioral health services to your patients.”
The letter from Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas is signed by 40 of his fellow Assembly members, and the letter from Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire is signed by 20 of his fellow senators. It’s highly unusual for state legislators to take such a strong position in a labor contract dispute, but Kaiser has a notorious track record of denying patients timely, adequate mental health care, especially during strikes.
In 2023, the California Department of Managed Health Care fined Kaiser $50 million, citing the HMO for understaffing its mental health services and ordering it to draft a state-mandated Corrective Action Plan, which Kaiser has still failed to produce. The agency also cited Kaiser for canceling 111,803 individual and group therapy appointments during a 2022 strike by NUHW-represented mental health therapists in Northern California.
There is growing evidence that Kaiser is also violating the rights of its patients during the ongoing strike in Southern California. Complaints filed by NUHW have documented instances of Kaiser forcing patients onto 30-day appointment waitlists, canceling psychotherapy groups for thousands of patients, failing to adequately staff its hospice services, and sending patients with severe conditions to an outside provider unequipped to care for them.
Kaiser is legally obligated to maintain mental health services during a strike, but its initial contingency plan submitted to the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) was barely more than a page without any detail for how it would provide critical mental health services for its 4.8 million members from San Diego to Bakersfield.
“I have seen the strike contingency plan that Kaiser submitted to DMHC, and I am greatly concerned that the plan does not provide sufficient detail regarding Kaiser’s arrangements to prevent widespread appointment cancellations without timely and appropriate replacement services,” Rivas wrote. “I have learned that patient appointments are indeed being canceled at an alarming rate and that these cancellations are leading to sometimes indefinite delays, or worse, denials of care.”
Kaiser’s 2,400 striking mental health therapists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, and psychologists from San Diego to Bakersfield have been on strike since October 21 and have not been invited back to the bargaining table by Kaiser since the first week of the strike.
The workers are seeking a contract that would:
- Provide them the same amount of time (seven hours per week) to perform critical patient care duties that can’t be done during appointments as their counterparts working for Kaiser in Northern California. The lack of time to respond to patient calls and emails, prepare for appointments, and devise treatment plans is a major reason why therapists leave Kaiser, contributing to the HMO’s chronic understaffing issues.
- Restore pensions that nearly all Kaiser employees receive, including mental health workers in Northern California, but were taken away from mental health professionals in Southern California a decade ago.
- Close the gap between themselves and therapists who provide medical care at Kaiser, who make up to 40 percent higher salaries.
