WE NEED YOUR HELP AS FOLLOWS FACEBOOK FRIENDS
The following statement is being shared and outlines an injustice that is occurring as you will read. A UH Retiree Benefits Task Force on behalf of retirees and with their help has been addressing this injustice since mid September of this year. PLEASE LIKE and COMMENT if you wish on this post so your friends will then see this post also. If they LIKE and/or COMMENT, their friends will see this post. The message will spread quickly. Thank you for your attention and help with this critical mission on behalf of these deserving long term employees of University Hospital.
This letter comes from approsimately 300 of us. We are all retirees of University Hospital. We represent every possible line of work: caregivers, clerical staff, custodial staff, etc. We all worked 30 or more years for University Hospital, and we are all at least 65 years old. We are senior citizens with our average age 74. Many of us are dealing with health issues with some undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We are vulnerable mainly due to our age. We did honorable work together side by side. We depended on each other at work. We have strong bonds. Our major strength is that we care for and want to help each other. We felt this way at work and we still do. Our group has been dealt a TERRIBLE INJUSTICE. One we are committed as a group to rectify.
In return for our extraordinary length of service of 30 or more years, University Hospital PROMISED and COMMITTED to paying for a Medicare supplement insurance policy for us. This commitment is in writing and well documented in policy and procedures. This commitment has been in place for all of our group who worked 30 or more years and are over 65.
Piedmont Augusta has announced that this benefit will end and will no longer be paid for even folks currently enrolled in the program. The monthly cost of the insurance is around $80-150 which is about $1000-1800 per year per person. Many of us attended information meetings where the intent to “sunset” this benefit was reinforced by Piedmont officials. We also learned that the current CEO has left the organization in preparation for the new CEO recently named in the local press. This retiring CEO was provided a post-retirement executive compensation benefit of 3 times his annual salary. That comes to somewhere above $4.5 MILLION dollars for one individual. In addition, retirees over age 60 with 20-29 years of continuous service were promised they could continue their medical insurance under the hospital’s annual plan at the reduced group rate. This benefit to this group of retirees is also being eliminated by Piedmont.
Our questions to Piedmont Augusta are:
How can ours and this one CEOs post-retirement agreements be so inconsistent?
Is such a payout for the retiring CEO consistent with not-for-profit expectations and guidelines?
How does the Board of Directors and the Richmond County Hospital Authority reconcile these inconsistencies?
What about open meetings and local press holding a community not-for-profit accountable?
We believe that University/Piedmont leaderships have concluded that we are powerless to resist their will and their economic superiority. They believe we can be steam-rolled. We want Piedmont to be a successful care partner in our community but this journey CANNOT begin with this dishonorable act of discarding the very people who help University Hospital become the system with which Piedmont wanted to integrate.
We need our community to help our family of retirees speak out and send a message to Piedmont Augusta: We expect more honor and compassion from this organization.
