The Stop Surprise Billing Act combines 4 measures into 1
The Stop Surprise Billing and Protect Patients Act jams no fewer than four disparate health care issues into one ballot proposition, making it difficult to discern what it’s really about. Or what’s most at stake.
That may not matter.
Critics led by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce are defining it principally as an out-of-state union driven ballot initiative aimed at scoring a sizable pay raise for hospital workers other than doctors and managers.
They are not wrong in the criticism. The initiative requires each private hospital workers’ pay be increased by 5% on Jan. 1, 2021 and by another 5% each of the following three years, regardless of experience or performance. It resets the “minimum wage” for untold job categories: New hires would earn no less than the lowest paid for that job category or same set of responsibilities.
The 20% pay increase over four years applies to all “direct care hospital workers,” defined as those who provide “services supporting patient care.” That means not only nurses, aides and medical technicians but also janitors, housekeepers, food service workers and nonadministrative staffers.
The ballot measure is funded largely by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, a California union that bills itself as an advocate of both health care and racial justice.
In fact, a legal challenge filed on Friday against the initiative includes the claim that the California union violated the law by not clearly identifying that it is the financial sponsor behind the Arizonans Fed Up with Failing Healthcare (Healthcare Rising Arizona) committee pushing the measure.
On the week Stop Surprise Billing submitted its petition signatures, a spokesman for the union told Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services that COVID-19 helped reveal cracks in the health care system, including stressed and underpaid workers.
Now, there’s a legitimate debate to be had about frontline health care workers and the risks they’re assuming in the pandemic. Many have called for more compensation for the dangerous work.
The humongous HEROES Act passed by the Democrat-led U.S. House attempts to address that. It earmarks $200 billion in hazard pay for essential workers that include those in health care.
But the Stop Surprise Billing initiative began last summer, months before the pandemic struck. The timing of the novel coronavirus may be fortuitous for the people behind the measure, but it does nothing to explain their motivations.
More revealing was an op-ed that Sean Wherley, another spokesman for SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, wrote last August, in which he compared the initiative as a “continuation of the work we did in 2016 to raise the minimum wage and provide paid sick leave to Arizona workers through The Fairness Project.”
The Fairness Project is a Washington, D.C.-based economic-justice nonprofit that in recent years has successfully pushed Medicaid expansion and minimum wage/paid leave policies via ballot initiatives. Arizona’s Proposition 206 raised minimum wage from $8.05 an hour to $12 an hour this year.
Stop Surprise Billing would raise that minimum to $14.58 an hour. Regardless of one’s views on livable wages, however, it seems disingenuous to sell the proposal as a way to help stressed and overworked direct care health workers — in essence, using nurses and technicians to raise the pay of low-skilled workers.
Nor do backers help the cause by packing essentially four ballot measures into one.
The pay raise is tucked between a redefinition on surprise medical billings, a guarantee that people with preexisting conditions could secure insurance should the Affordable Care Act is repealed and requirements for private hospitals to meet national standards for infection control.
Each issue is sufficiently complex and contested to warrant separate consideration.
Arizona, for instance, already has adopted legislation to address surprise billing for emergency services and services from out-of-network providers, limiting patients’ liability and allowing for arbitration to settle disputes. There’s also legislation contemplated by Congress on the subject.
Signature collectors funded by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West could have easily circulated petitions for four initiatives as they could have for one.
Separate measures would have been more digestible. And honest.
The voters would have benefited from it. So would the union-backed effort.