When the clock struck midnight and 2023 came to an end, workers at Seton Medical Center and Seton Coastside suddenly entered the new year with a health insurance plan that many of them couldn’t actually use.
In violation of its union contracts, AHMC Healthcare imposed a new health plan for 2024 that forced all Seton workers, including NUHW members, to either pay up to $6,000 a year to keep access to their doctors and hospitals or accept a new version of the employer-paid health plan with very few participating doctors mostly based in San Francisco.
The free plan, which most NUHW members had chosen, only had two participating hospital systems: John Muir Health in Walnut Creek and Seton, which doesn’t offer pediatric or prenatal care.
The impact was immediate, and workers were furious.
“I’m worried about my family, my kids not having basic insurance that works,” Julia Vinogratsky, a respiratory therapist at the hospital with three children, told KQED. ”The closest doctors are about 45 minutes to an hour’s drive.”
Rachelle Ortua, a materials management technician at Seton, told KPIX-5 that she recently had to delay vaccinations for her then-four-month-old daughter because her doctor wouldn’t take her new insurance and that the nearest hospital available to treat her daughter is more than an hour’s drive from her Sunnyvale apartment.
The workers held a two-day strike in March, and when the AHMC, which owns the hospital and skilled nursing center, still wouldn’t budge they continued to agitate, marching on bosses, moving petitions and winning support from prominent local elected officials.
“We weren’t going to give up,” said Suad Husary, a respiratory therapist, who has worked at the hospital for 27 years. “It was too important for our families and our communities. So many of us are connected to Daly City and our facilities. We knew that if AHMC could get away eliminating health benefits for healthcare workers, it would be emboldened to keep making cuts that would leave patients without the care they’ve depended on at Seton for generations.”
The workers, who include medical technicians, nursing assistants, respiratory therapists, food service aides and licensed vocational nurses, secured two big healthcare victories in their new three-year contract:
- Improvements to the employer-paid plan so that it includes more doctors and hospitals.
- A sharp cost reduction to the paid health plan so more workers can afford to have a broader choice of doctors and hospitals.
That’s not all they won. The contract includes a 6 percent raise retroactive to Jan. 1, 2024, 5 percent raises in 2025 and 2026 and a $1,000 bonus to settle a grievance over AHMC illegally reducing healthcare benefits at the start of the year.
Workers also gained more paid time off, clearer educational leave use, and a provision requiring the hospital to bargain over any changes to staffing matrices.
“This is a huge victory,” said Melanie Montes Kok, a scheduler at Seton Medical Center. “We fought hard for this contract not only because we were outraged by how management treated us, but because we were fighting for each other and our patients. Everyone who receives care at a Seton facility will receive better care now that healthcare workers can stay at Seton knowing that we can once again access healthcare ourselves.”
