SEQUIM — Although union and hospital negotiators remain divided over medical insurance issues on the bargaining table, Olympic Medical Center’s chief executive officer said he hopes the two parties will resume negotiations next week.
“I think we’re fairly far apart,” Eric Lewis said after he addressed about 40 attending Tuesday’s Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce luncheon at SunLand Golf & Country Club.
“We are concerned about Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The econoSDHpmy and government reimbursements have changed everything.”
Lewis repeatedly stressed that the Port Angeles-based hospital, which operates a Sequim campus, faces huge financial challenges with health care reform and an uncertain economy.
“We have to control our costs,” he said. “We can’t go into deficit spending.”
The hospital for 10 months has been negotiating with Service Employees International Union 1199NW, which represents more than 350 nurses, service workers and dietary workers.
Medical insurance
Under the hospital proposal, full-time employees would continue to pay nothing for their medical insurance but would be asked to pay about $17 per month more for a spouse and $95 per month more for any number of children up to age 26.
Management would get the same benefits package as the union workers.
Contacted Tuesday, Margaret Cary, chief negotiator for SEIU at the bargaining table, said the proposed increase would especially affect lower-paid employees with families.
“We have members that are already struggling to pay medical costs,” she said.
“Any increase for any of these people is going to be significant. It’s really putting a burden on the families in the community.”
Lewis said negotiation of benefits is critical because the hospital spends 60 percent of its revenues on salaries, wages and benefits.
Union representatives said the proposal amounts to steep cuts to health care benefits.
It also falls short of guaranteeing staffing minimums that represented employees believe will keep patients safe, union members said.
The most recent contract expired in October.
Picket on Thursday
An informational picket of SEIU employees is scheduled at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, with a community rally at 4:45 p.m. in front of the hospital at 939 Caroline St. in Port Angeles, Cary said.
Health care workers are to participate before and after their shifts and during breaks.
State Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, and a union-represented firefighter for Clallam County Fire District No. 3, will address the picketers, he said.
“I think it’s best for the community that we have an agreement,” Van De Wege said when he was contacted Tuesday.
He will speak in his capacity as a representative of District 24 — which covers Clallam and Jefferson counties and part of Grays Harbor County — but added that he also has experience with union negotiations as a firefighter for Clallam County Fire District No. 3.
His union has binding arbitration, he said, and OMC workers do not.
“The thing most concerning to me is that a group of workers who do not have binding arbitration have been prohibited from striking,” Van De Wege said.
“That will have far-reaching consequences, well beyond what happens in Port Angeles,” he added.
SEIU had threatened to conduct an 18-hour strike Thursday.
To avert the strike, Lewis said the hospital took an unprecedented pre-emptive action.
It went to court.
Kitsap County Superior Court Judge M. Karlynn Haberly agreed the threatened strike was illegal because the individual defendants were public employees.
State law RCW 41.56.120 reads: “Nothing contained in this chapter shall permit or grant any public employee the right to strike or refuse to perform his official duties.”
The judge Aug. 3 granted Olympic Medical Center a temporary two-week injunction against a strike, and a hearing to make the action permanent is set Aug. 17.
Van De Wege said that as a firefighter, he can’t strike, either — but he does have binding arbitration.
The strike would have cost the public hospital district covering the Port Angeles and Sequim areas $600,000 to fly in 150 replacement workers, Lewis said.
Nonrefundable fee
The hospital paid a nonrefundable $90,000 fee to secure the temporary workers in anticipation of the strike.
Lewis told the Sequim audience that the hospital is trying to create “more services locally, more services in Sequim, more services in Port Angeles.”
He said the expected approval of an affiliation with Swedish Medical Center in Seattle will help OMC keep patients local.
For example, he said, patients who have strokes will be able to contact their doctors at Swedish using video teleconferencing.
He said the hospital is hiring two new neurologists for Sequim and Port Angeles and that recruiting would improve with an affiliation with Swedish.
Besides new TrueBeam linear accelerator technology added to the Sequim campus of Olympic Medical Center, an orthopedic clinic has been added on Fifth Avenue as well as an emergency helipad to airlift patients to Seattle hospitals.
Also under consideration is opening an urgent-care center in Sequim, he said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
