NEWS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK WESLEY LAPOINTE
LEADERS
REJECTED: Providence denied far more nondisabling COVID-19 claims than any other workers’ compensation insurer.
Presumed Healthy The state’s largest hospital system continues to deny employees’ COVID-19 workers’ compensation claims. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
Last week, Providence Health & Services, the state’s biggest hospital group, went on red alert because of the state’s steeply increasing coronavirus caseload. “We face an unprecedented surge of COVID-19 patients,” Providence executives told staff in an email obtained by The Oregonian. Yet as Providence steels itself for the surge, it remains locked in a battle with its own employees about whether they’re owed compensation for getting exposed to the virus on the job. “As the pandemic has gotten worse, Providence has gotten worse,” says Oregon Nurses Association spokesman Kevin Mealy, whose union represents Providence nurses. “They aren’t protecting their frontline providers.” All of Oregon’s nearly 2 million workers are covered by worker’s compensation insurance. (All employers are required to purchase insurance for their workers or self-insure.) About 20% of those employees work in health care. Yet state figures continue to show a phenomenon WW first reported in July: A disproportionate chunk of all the denied nondisabling workers’ compensation claims related to COVID-19 come from Providence Health & Services, which is self-insured. (The state defines a “nondisabling” claim as one for which the claimant requires medical services but is unlikely to be permanently impaired.) Providence has denied 90 such claims statewide this year. No other employer has denied half that number. Providence spokesman Gary Walker says the hospital chain complies with state workers’ compensation laws and welcomes claims from employees. But Walker says of the 90 denials that only one person actually tested positive for COVID-19, and that was a nonworkplace exposure. “Exposure just means someone claimed exposure, and not that they tested positive or actually contracted COVID19,” Walker said in an email. “If someone tests negative or is not symptomatic, there is actually nothing to ‘accept’ for medical or disability benefits.” In other words, Walker says Providence employees are seeking workers’ compensation to which they are not entitled. Mealy says he’s puzzled that Providence remains an “outlier.” 6
Willamette Week DECEMBER 9, 2020 wweek.com
“Nurses have been asking for basic health and safety measures for months,” he says. “That includes adequate PPE, exposure notification, access to testing, COVID-19 sick leave, and presumptive eligibility for workers’ compensation. It’s time for Providence to prove it cares about its caregivers.” In at least 14 states, including Washington and Wyoming, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, workers who say they contracted COVID-19 in the course of their work are presumed to have gotten infected at work and are automatically covered by workers’ comp. In Oregon, the state panel that advises the Legislature and Gov. Kate Brown on workers’ compensation deadlocked this summer on whether to provide “presumptive coverage.” Gov. Brown and Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem) declined to comment, but House Speaker Tina Kotek says she’s frustrated with the state’s failure to protect frontline workers and will push for legislation next year. “Speaker Kotek supports a workers’ compensation insurance presumption that would provide basic protection and security for workers who are essential to a sustained economic recovery,” said her spokesman Danny Moran. Here are the statistics from the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services for denied nondisabling claims for COVID-19 for all insurers through Nov. 30. The state does not track how many nondisabling claims insurers accepted.
WORKERS’ COMP INSURER
NO. OF DENIALS
Providence Health & Services–Oregon
90
SAIF Corp.
40
Church Mutual Insurance Co.
18
LM Insurance Corp.
7
49 other insurers combined
50
TOTAL DENIALS
205
Source: Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services
THE BIG NUMBER
™13
That’s the number of Oregon prison inmates who were promised early release due to COVID -19 but are still behind bars. How long they’ve been waiting: between four and 10 weeks. The reason: housing. On Sept. 29, Gov. Kate Brown announced she had commuted the sentences of 66 Oregon inmates considered medically vulnerable to the virus or who were within two months of release. WW has learned two of the 66—both of whom the state determined to be “medically vulnerable—have still not been released and their release date is unknown. That means they’ve have been incarcerated for 10 weeks past the date the governor announced their commutations. Similarly, 11 inmates housed at Mill Creek Correctional Facility in Salem, most of whom were told their sentences would be commuted Nov. 19, are still awaiting release after multiple delays. Last month, their release date was pushed back to Nov. 25. Then it was delayed a second time. Nine of the 11 are medically vulnerable, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. DOC says the holdup is finding appropriate housing for those released early. “Safe, affordable and felon-friendly housing has been an enormous hurdle for release planning,” DOC spokeswoman Jennifer Black tells WW. “Leadership at the Department of Corrections takes public safety very seriously and has committed to thorough review of each adult-in-custody file before forwarding to the governor for consideration of commutation. The work of meticulously reviewing the files of those under consideration is a significant undertaking for the agency.” The difficulty in finding housing will likely be a sticking point going forward: Gov. Brown announced Dec. 2 she had expanded the pool of inmates whose sentences could be commuted during the pandemic to those within six months of release (before, it was inmates within two months of release who had not been convicted of dangerous crimes, as well as those considered medically vulnerable). The guessing game can be draining on inmates and their families, says Diana Bouvia, the wife of a man incarcerated at Mill Creek for delivery of methamphetamine. Mark Bouvia, 62, was told he’d be released Nov. 19. He is considered medically vulnerable: He has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to his wife, as well as scar tissue on his lungs from an injury he got as a teenager. In October, Diana Bouvia says, corrections staff showed up at her home, where she lives with her two adult children, to assess whether it met the state’s criteria. “All good,” she recalls the corrections staff telling her after the inspection. The following month, Bouvia says, her husband received another notice: His release date was delayed to Nov. 25 (she provided WW a copy of this notice). As Thanksgiving approached, his wife says, the department took Mark Bouvia off his work detail, gave him a coronavirus test for which he tested negative, and assigned him a parole officer. (DOC says Bouvia’s release date was pushed to December because his housing wasn’t approved until mid-October.) “He had something to look forward to,” Diana Bouvia says, “and just to have the rug pulled out from under you… it’s awful.” DOC now tells WW it expects to release many of the Mill Creek inmates in mid- to late December: eight on Dec. 17, one on Dec. 23, and another on Dec. 30—four to six weeks past their initial release date of Nov. 19. Black added that release dates are “projected”—not set in stone. “Oh God, that would be a miracle,” Bouvia said when WW told her DOC says it plans to release the inmates by the end of the month. “You worry so much about the COVID. You know they’re right next to each other.” TESS RISKI.
