Lee, Innamorato slam UPMC, vow to hold health care giant accountable

When Katie Trombetta began working as a nurse at UPMC Presbyterian in 2020, she stepped into a fully staffed medical surgical unit. She had just graduated from Waynesburg University and was excited to learn from her more experienced colleagues in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

But as the pandemic dragged on, many of those colleagues left UPMC to take higher paying jobs as travel nurses. The staff thinned. Just five months into her job, Trombetta became a charge nurse. She had to take on additional duties while continuing to learn how to best care for patients. Her understaffed unit needed help.

It’s a problem that has consequences, she said.

“I can’t underscore enough how greatly the staffing crisis hurts the people entrusted to our care,” she said. “As nurses, it is our responsibility, day in and day out, to keep people alive. Without the staff we need, care can be delayed and people can die.”

Trombetta discussed her experience Thursday during an online news conference in which U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, who represents the state’s 12th District, and state Rep. Sara Innamorato charged UPMC with exercising monopoly power that has proven damaging to health care workers such as Trombetta, the people they care for, and communities in the Pittsburgh region.

The two Democratic lawmakers vowed to take action.

Innamorato, who represents District 21, announced she’d be introducing in the Pennsylvania General Assembly a piece of legislation called the Open Markets Act, which would strengthen the state’s attorney general’s ability to go after businesses and organizations that establish monopolies and unfairly manipulate labor markets.

At the federal level, Lee said, she would push agencies to investigate UPMC as a monopoly, and look into the health care giant’s nonprofit status. In addition, she said, “I’ll work towards legislative solutions, where there is more bipartisan opportunity than you might think, even in the Congress we have now.”

Innamorato said she’s hopeful Republicans will support her effort to rein in UPMC. 

“UPMC is the largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, not just in our region,” she said. “So we’re seeing UPMC buy hospitals and hospital systems moving eastward. They’re impacting the availability of health care in rural areas. They’re impacting and suppressing wages and unionization efforts. And so this is an issue that is being experienced by areas that are traditionally represented by Republicans.”

The lawmakers agreed with Trombetta on key problems: low wages, understaffing and the lack of input from nurses and other health care workers in decision-making processes. UPMC isn’t fixing these problems because “they don’t have to,” Trombetta said.

This is a result of UPMC’s dominance over health care in the region, she added.  “They own most of the hospitals and control most of the jobs. They figure nurses will just eventually come back, or they’ll train enough new ones, and that staff will return to normal without [UPMC] giving up any of their power.”

Pat Garofalo agreed. He’s director of state and local policy for the American Economic Liberties Project, an organization that advocates for greater corporate accountability and fights what it sees as monopolistic corporations. He said UPMC controls three out of four hospital jobs in the region. “It’s really the modern version of the company town.”

Economic Liberties produced a report that Innamorato said outlines actions that can be taken at all levels of government to “make sure that UPMC lives up to its obligations to its patients, its workers and the community as a nonprofit hospital.”

Dominance of life and work by large, powerful entities has long been an issue in the region, Lee noted. Looming over her hometown of Braddock is a steel mill first owned by Andrew Carnegie, one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists in the late 1800s. The mill remains, but little of the wealth it produces spills into Braddock. 

Braddock’s hospital was a fixture in the community for more than a century and provided health care and much-needed jobs in a borough marked for decades by boarded-up storefronts. UPMC bought the hospital in 1996 and 14 years later closed the facility. The hospital was losing money and its admissions were declining, UPMC said at the time. In 2012, UPMC opened a new facility — Lee calls it a “luxury hospital” — in the wealthier suburb of Monroeville.

The closure dealt a body blow to Braddock. Braddock residents, including Lee’s relatives, lost paychecks and easy access to care — many of the borough’s residents have limited access to transportation. Instead of a short walk, they’d often have to commute miles to receive treatment.

Braddock is “truly a sad example of the dangers of monopoly powers and greedy corporate barons who exploit workers and extract from communities and leave us behind when they see profit in other places,” she said

Lee called this an “urgent moment” and said she takes seriously the concerns voiced by hospital workers — she and Innamorato heard from a number of workers during a hearing in September. “It’s time we recognize that we have the power to stand up for our hospital workers and our patients,” Lee said. “And not just with bells and applause as they come out of their shifts. We owe it to our workers to use every federal state and local tool to hold UPMC accountable.”

A UPMC spokesperson noted that the organization announced last week it will increase the minimum starting wages for entry-level positions at its hospitals and facilities in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and the Williamsburg area to $18 an hour by January 2025.