Nurse cared for COVID-19 patients then caught it. Loophole leaves her quarantine unpaid
As a dialysis nurse, Daniele Haddad regularly spends hours alongside patients who’ve tested positive for COVID-19.
It wasn’t a surprise to her when — despite a double layer of face masks, a face shield, a gown and gloves — she tested positive for COVID-19 in May. The surprise came when her employer told her she wasn’t going to get paid for the mandatory quarantine period, despite the fact that a government program passed in April would cover the costs.
Haddad fell into a loophole in the federal law that Democrats call a “poison pill” and Republicans say helped avoid a shortage of healthcare workers. She’s not alone. A new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 17 million healthcare workers in the U.S. are exempted from the paid leave benefits offered in the federal bill.
More than 63,000 U.S. healthcare workers have contracted COVID-19 this year, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’re sacrificing ourselves and yet when we’re off work because we got the disease because we’re caring for the community we have no recourse. The companies can just say no,” she said. “Everybody says they’re grateful to nurses, but how can they say that and not protect us?”
It’s a problem for healthcare workers across the country, including in Texas and Missouri, but fear of professional retaliation has kept the conversation largely within private nursing Facebook groups.
For Haddad, a 44-year-old nurse in Coral Springs, it started on May 25 when her 71-year-old father was hospitalized. He tested positive for COVID-19. So did Haddad and her mother.
Haddad told her employer, Miami-based Apollo Renal Center, she would be quarantined at her home for the next two weeks.
Thankfully, Haddad and her 69-year-old mother had mild cases, and her father was released from the hospital after a little over a week after overcoming double pneumonia. But in that time, the bills started to pile up, and Haddad began to worry about her next paycheck.
She used up most of her paid time off in March when she got sick and quarantined as a precaution.
“I paid for my own Airbnb. I depleted all of my savings doing that because I didn’t want to get my parents sick,” she said.
After waiting 11 days for her COVID-19 test results, which were negative, she returned to work. This time, she didn’t have savings to cushion the blow.
She called and emailed her firm asking if they were going to pay her. She cited the Family First Coronavirus Response Act, a federal bill passed in April that allows the government to pay for two weeks of emergency leave for anyone in a company with fewer than 500 employees, like Haddad’s.
She said the CEO of her company, Federico Dumenigo, called her personally to let her know they wouldn’t be paying her for her mandatory quarantine, despite the promise of a full refund from the government. He pointed to a loophole in the law that allows employers of healthcare workers to decide whether or not to offer the benefit.
She begged him to reconsider. She sent screenshots of her bank account, which had a negative balance, and bounce back messages from her pharmacy, which couldn’t refill her family’s prescriptions because of the low account balance.
Dumenigo did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did anyone at his company. Haddad said she never received a written response denying her claim for paid leave. She elected not to attempt to apply for unemployment, a nightmarish experience in Florida.
“We should not be at the mercy of our employers to decide whether or not we can buy groceries or pay our bills. I got this virus taking care of others, willingly and lovingly. I just don’t understand I can be grossly neglected, not be taken care of, as I have taken care of others,” she said.
Besides exempting all healthcare workers, the federal bill also doesn’t apply to any private company with more than 500 employees.
Mary McLaughlin, a home healthcare aide in Tennessee, works for one of those companies. When her husband, a disabled veteran, was exposed to COVID-19 at his work in late March, the whole family went into quarantine.
She wasn’t expecting to get paid, because her company doesn’t offer paid time off until an employee has worked there for five consecutive years. But when her quarantine stretched into a third unpaid week after the parent of her patient complained about possible exposure, straining McLaughlin’s finances even further, she asked her employer about the recently passed Family First Coronavirus Response Act.
The response from corporate (weeks later) was no, they legally didn’t have to pay her. They suggested she apply for retroactive unemployment benefits, a confusing process that took McLaughlin hours. It’s been months and she hasn’t seen a dollar for those three weeks of quarantine — from the state or her employer.
“I don’t see why I should have to jump through all these hoops when I think my company should help me. They don’t even have a business without us,” she said. “Healthcare in America runs on a dime to make a dollar. They try to save pennies anywhere they can.”
McLaughlin and Haddad are just two of 17 million healthcare workers exempted from emergency paid leave, a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows. The current exemptions exclude a total of nearly 70 million workers, the researchers found.
“As the Department of Labor puts it, the explanation for excluding those workers is they’re an exceptional need right now during this pandemic. If they took off, there’d be a shortage of healthcare workers to address the pandemic,” said Michelle Long, a senior policy analyst for the Kaiser Family Foundation.
New York has sued President Donald Trump’s administration over the exclusions, but a federal judge has yet to issue a ruling.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, called those exclusions “poison pills” inserted by Republicans in the Senate after the House passed the Family First Coronavirus Response Act.
“The Senate got a lot of poison pills in the bill, thanks to the president,” she said. “He has all sorts of advisers telling him this is how you save money.”
Wilson said the lack of emergency paid leave for American workers isn’t a partisan issue, it’s a health emergency. She recalled talking to a constituent, a firefighter, with all the symptoms of the virus who didn’t get tested because he knew if he did his employer would force him to take unpaid time off he couldn’t afford.
The solution, she said, is for the Senate to pass the HEROES Act, which the House passed in May but the Senate has yet to take up. The bill removes the exemptions for healthcare workers and first responders.
However, the HEROES Act isn’t retroactive, so Haddad and Laughlin and the other healthcare workers who’ve needed emergency paid leave and haven’t gotten it, are out of luck.
Long, the researcher, pointed out that the HEROES Act would also expand paid benefits through the end of 2021. Currently, the Family First Coronavirus Response Act expires on December 31.
“If there are no additional attempts to expand this benefit, these workers are going to go back to the status quo,” she said.
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
