More than 800 resident doctors in the Buffalo area will go on strike September 4 and 5, in an effort to improve pay and benefits.
Local resident doctors are voicing their grievances over low wages, with some making what amounts to around $15 an hour over an 80-hour week.
Dr. Armin Tadayyon (Tih-DIE-YONE) says that not only is pay lacking, insurance coverage has decreased to the point where receiving medical care is nearly impossible.
“Medications that once cost $5 now cost upward to $250 and $300 per refill. Our deductible, where we had a $0 deductible, now insanely skyrocketed to $4,000. For families, it's worse. We don't make that much money as resident physicians. We average anywhere from 14 to $15 an hour. Somebody who is taking care of a family at $15 an hour cannot reasonably afford a $4,000 deductible.”
Tadayyon (Tah-DIE-YONE), a resident anesthesiologist who’s part of the bargaining process, says every negotiation attempt has failed, and now, 93% of the union bargaining board has agreed to strike.
Dr. Stuart Bussey, national president for the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, or UAPD, says the strike will be just the fourth in the national union’s history.
He says one of the biggest reasons for the strike is that doctors weren’t informed when their insurance coverage was changed.
7:06 “You're supposed to meet and confer with your opponent -- the union -- to say, ‘we're about to change our health insurance, can we talk about it?’ They didn't do that, they just did it … Now, they're paying hundreds and thousands more because it was baited and switched. In other words, the health insurance was jacked up. The deductibles were jacked up without informing the Union during the course of the negotiations.”
According to a statement from the University at Buffalo and Jacobs School of Medicine, the school and university are not “the legal entity responsible for negotiations with the medical residents,” but they hope a compromise is reached before the strike.
According to UB, the university and hospitals are not part of negotiations because University Medical Resident Services, or UMRS, is the employer.
But a search for UMRS leads to UB’s Cary Hall and a university phone number.
According to the UAPD, local resident doctors start making just over $60,000 and can reach just over $68,000 a year, while doctors at University of Rochester and SUNY Upstate start above $64,000 and can reach more than $80,000.
