Saturday, November 14, 2015

Kindred Slashes Coverage for Many Gentiva Employees

StrangeTony,

Courting comes with such lofty words.  Consider these from a December 2014 edition of "Better Together".

We know that many of you have questions specific to what benefits – including insurance, 401(k), and PTO– will look like for the combined company, and we want to reassure you that our Integration teams are hard at work to address these issues. We are committed to providing a robust benefits package for our teammates within the combined company, and as soon as we have a better idea of what that will look like, we will share a comprehensive communication with you

The corporate marriage was consummated in February 2015. Kindred's Chief People Officer promised a smattering of plans for employees to choose from and informed Gentiva employees the health insurance marketplace would be familiar to them.  He assured California employees they would continue to have access to their HMO, which ensures physician access through a primary care gatekeeper.

The marketplace I viewed bore no resemblance to Gentiva 2015, which had at least two levels of insurance coverage higher than anything Kindred is offering for 2016.  I searched for coverage for physician visits like my current plan, $X copay for a primary care visit and $XX for a specialist visit.


I could not find one plan with this basic feature.  Kindred omitted the "ro" and has a bust of a benefits package available to many employees, especially those outside California. 

Anonymous (from Gendred)

6 comments:

  1. Why would anyone be surprised at anything these vipers do. As a former Kindred at Home employee I have watched the company slowly and in some cases hastily ruin a good company. As a clinician they have changed us from a premier home health/hospice software to a dinosaur software. Thank goodness there are many jobs that are interested in serving their patients as they should be and making sure the clinicians are happy and have the best tools at their disposal. Just watch the stocks they keep going down, down, down. I will miss my co-workers, but they will leave soon too. I will especially miss my patients. Other than that good riddance to Kentiva. They also had bullies at their accounting office that acted like it was their job to tell the clinicians what to do. I do not know what Gentiva was like prior to the merger, but this is awful and sad. I

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  2. Any changes to the PTO for Gentiva?

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  3. Not for Gentiva employees but Kindred at Home have a new PTO accrual schedule. Someone would have to tell me if it's better or worse than before.

    A coworker called about the new insurance and getting a plan with physician copays as she has a GI specialist. The Mercer people referred her to healthcare.gov and getinsured.com

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  4. Kindred PTO is worse and so is the insurance coverage. "Better Together" but for who, not the employees and mainly the caregivers.

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  5. Why work for "Kindred" when you could transfer to "Gentiva" and get better benefits? Seems backwards to me. Usually the company being bought has to go onto the buying company's benefits, period. Why make loyal Kindred employees suffer and let Gentiva employees keep their sweet PTO and insurance?

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  6. Gentiva secretly cut PTO accrual rates and health insurance contributions for employees long before Kindred bought us out. Now Kindred is continuing the practice under the leadership of Kindred at Home President David Causby. We'll see if Causby gets rid of employee surveys, given Gentiva never did one after buying Odyssey.

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