UPMC Hit with Anti-Trust Lawsuit for Establishing a Monopoly on Hospital Care and Driving Down Wages
South West Pennsylvania’s largest industry is sick care, and UPMC is by and large its largest operator, pulling in $26 billion from the region a year. A nurse has just filed a potential class action lawsuit against the massive hospital conglomerate, claiming that the owner of 40 hospitals has shuttered four and downsized others and in the process terminating 1,800 jobs. The suit describes how UPMC used these measures to squeeze its workers and increase its bottomline.
The suit states that UPMC subjects nurses and staff to “draconian increases in workloads through a draconian system of mobility restrictions and widespread labor law violations that lock employees into sub-competitive pay and working conditions… UPMC’s mistreatment of its skilled healthcare workers is one part of an overarching anti-competitive scheme,” according to the lawsuit. “Implemented by UPMC to acquire and exploit monopoly power over the provision of hospital output services and monopoly power over the employment of hospital workers.”
The case filed on January 18th against UPMC states that for every 10% increase in UPMC’s market share, workers’ pay is reduced by 30 to 57 cents per hour. In response, UPMC’s vice president of public relations, Gloria Kreps, said that UPMC is planning of moving to $18 an hour for nonunion workers by 2025.
Hospital consolidation has run rampant over the past 30 years, leading to the closure of hundreds of hospitals nationwide and ending the era of stand-alone, independent hospitals. Once-upstanding nonprofit institutions that were the pride of a community are now corporate behemoths that have fully injected themselves into the doctor-patient relationship, destroying trust in the medical profession and adding further to the already horrendous level of iatrogenesis that plagues American hospitals.
A recent report by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, based in Pittsburgh, predicts that in more than half of the states, 25% or more of the rural hospitals are at risk of closing, and in 12 states, 40% or more are at risk.
Rural communities have seen the greatest attack from this corporate consolidation. The complaint filed against UPMC claims the hospital system is exercising 90% market share control in the rural areas of the state where it operates. Their monopoly spans over 50% of the Pittsburgh metro region.
The presiding judge, Susan Paradise Baxter, of the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, will be hearing this antitrust litigation. If the class action request is accepted, this case is sure to make very large waves in an already turbulent sick care sea.