Starting last week, I have had to miss work because I caught covid from one of my coworkers–several people in my office have since become ill. Unlike most of the people I work with, I will have to miss a full three weeks because I have lupus, and that makes me immunocompromised–which means that I will naturally shed more of the virus. But one thing all of us share is that we were all denied worker’s comp–despite the fact that it is pretty obvious we all caught it at work. That means, if a worker wants to get paid during their time off, they have to instead use up their PTO (paid time off). Likewise, we will all be responsible for any costs associated with covid treatment that is not covered by insurance, or that our employer does not cover (we can get Paxlovid free if we use the hospital pharmacy).
I wondered if this was something that mainly just effects the people working for my company–after doing a bit of research, I learned this is a common problem across the United States, especially now that the pandemic is “officially” over. Despite this fact, healthcare workers are still getting sick–after all, we are on the front lines. Prior to the pandemic, infectious diseases were generally not grounds for a worker’s comp claim. As a result, some states’ governors actually signed executive orders that required insurers to automatically assume covid infections in healthcare workers were contracted at work, while some states actually codified these changes into law. Many of these orders and laws have since expired–leaving many healthcare workers with little recourse if they catch covid and have to miss work or pay for medical treatment.
In some cases, even employees who contracted long covid due to an infection they suffered during the pandemic, and were severely disabled as a result, have been unable to obtain any sort of compensation from workers comp–and in many cases, the courts have sided with the insurance companies. One example of how dirty healthcare workers are being treated involves a Tennessee man who contracted covid from a coworker and had to be hospitalized in the ICU several times as a result. He was permanently disabled by his brush with covid, and now suffers from a-fib and blood clots in his lungs and heart. He is lucky to be alive–yet the court ruled against him, citing the fact that he “did not produce medical evidence” and “did not cooperate” and did not file his claim soon enough–but gosh, I wonder how you’re supposed to do all that stuff when you have had to go to the ICU several times because of your illness? He worked for a healthcare facility–why didn’t somebody, perhaps his employer, help him get the records he needed?
While I am on the mend and won’t need to do more than just stay home during my three weeks of isolation time, I am still getting screwed out of two weeks’ pay that I can hardly afford–and while I will get paid for one of the three weeks I will be off, I am having to use MY PTO to do it. It would have been nice to be able to use those hours around, say, Christmas for spending time with my family. Why should healthcare employees have to pay the costs for an illness they contracted at work? I wonder how many other healthcare workers across the country are in the same boat I am. Is it any wonder so many people quit the healthcare field during covid, and it is now so hard to hire people to work at any price?
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