At the request of NUHW, the Assembly Health Committee on May 6 held a special informational hearing that shines a light on Kaiser’s understaffed and underfunded behavioral health services.
Lawmakers heard from Kaiser patient Milton Brown, Kaiser therapist Kassaundra Gutierrez-Thompson and NUHW President Sophia Mendoza. Notably absent from the hearing were representatives from Kaiser Permanente, which provided only a two-page letter much to the dismay of the committee’s chairperson, Assemblymember Mia Bonta of Alameda.
“I have to say, I’m supremely disappointed,” Bonta said. “One in four Californians are supposedly served by Kaiser in this very important space of behavioral health care.
“I just want to say, for the record, providing a two-page letter to this Legislature where we have an opportunity to actually hear directly from them, engage in conversation about their efforts to be able to support Californians, is this to me—”
As CalMatters and Courthouse News reported, she crumbled the letter into a ball.
The hearing demonstrated not only that Kaiser is still far from fixing its mental health deficiencies for which it was forced to pay a $200 million penalty in 2023, but that the nearly 5,000 NUHW-represented mental health and addiction medicine workers at Kaiser remain resolute in their commitment to winning full parity for behavioral health care within the Kaiser system.
Gutierrez-Thompson, who resigned from Kaiser immediately after the hearing, told lawmakers that therapists in her program often see 14 to 16 patients back-to-back for 30-minute appointments.
“This approach is not aligned to clinical standards that most therapy sessions are 45 to 50 minutes long, which provides the needed depth for effective therapy,” she said. “Kaiser’s compressed format undermines the therapeutic process. Patients get short-changed of the healing they deserve.”
Brown, a psychologist in private practice, told lawmakers his daughter had to wait a month for a therapy appointment after trying to take her own life and then couldn’t get the appropriate treatment until after a second suicide attempt.
“With that huge delay they were basically willing to let her die. Egregious, egregious, egregious,” he said. “How many people have to die for Kaiser to wake up and do what’s right?”
Speaking after both Brown and Gutierrez-Thompson, NUHW President Sophia Mendoza faulted Kaiser for its devaluing of behavioral health care, which NUHW members have experienced both on the job and in contract negotiations with Kaiser.
“The root of the problem is the ongoing systemic undervaluation of behavioral health care by Kaiser Permanente,” Mendoza told law makers. “Kaiser simply does not give behavioral health the same priority it does medical surgical care. There should be no difference in the priority given behavioral healthcare and medical surgical care. There should just be health care. That’s the whole principle of behavioral health parity which is required by law.”
Mendoza continued: “If we are successful in helping Kaiser embrace and implement true behavioral health parity by valuing behavioral health care as much as it values medical and surgical care and by investing in it accordingly, it will be a game changer not only for these plan members, but for our state’s entire healthcare system.”
