MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – UVM Medical Center support staff rallied at the Statehouse Friday to urge the governor to support an expansion of Medicaid coverage. It comes after a pay raise in their latest contract pushed them off the benefits cliff.
“When I was on Medicaid, I just had to worry about getting better,” said Becci Searle-Schrader, a UVM support staff worker. In 2020 she was admitted to the hospital for two weeks to remove kidney stones. Medicaid paid for all her medical expenses. “The amount of testing — I would’ve either been bankrupt. I might’ve lost my job or there were points where I was going septic.”
The hospital’s support staff voted a year ago to unionize. They say before their wages increased by 20%, most members qualified for Medicaid, the government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income. However, in their bargaining with the hospital, they were able to raise their wages to a point where they no longer qualified. Now, they pay the same amount for health insurance as doctors and nurses.
“We’re paying huge amounts of our wages — which are better — but not great to access care, and many of us can’t,” said Heather Bauman, a phlebotomist at the hospital.
During bargaining sessions, the union says they requested an insurance plan where they would pay according to their salaries. But when it came time to discuss health insurance, they say the hospital administration “ignored it until there was no time left to bargain.”
In a statement, a UVM spokesperson says that they recognize that employee health care coverage is a complex issue that will require further investigation and collaboration. “As part of our agreement, we committed to creating a committee to examine updating the current coverage options, and we have followed through on that promise,” officials said
“We go in and do this work — hard, physically taxing work — and we need to be able to go to the doctors when we don’t feel well, but we cannot afford to do that,” Bauman said.
The union, along with the support staff, delivered a petition to the governor’s office urging him to consider the expansion.
