Pros
I have worked with Fairview for 4 years in a few different areas, and despite having increasingly disorganized and unprofessional bosses (1 was good) since the merger with Health East in 2019, it was always worth it due to the great pay, health insurance, and the co-workers and patients. Last year, in another move towards becoming even more of an evil empire, they sold Preferred One to United Healthcare. They insisted it would be essentially the same but it’s not. I pay $600 a month for the best family plan they have (it has more than doubled since 2019), and all of a sudden there’s things that aren’t in network that were before, and even within Fairview facilities (I only see Fairview and Health Partners providers with my Open Access plan) everything is more. My favorite was when I couldn’t take the Fit Test for a N95 mask because of a medical reason (this was in spring 2023), and either my bosses could say hey they don’t need to that since I work on a unit that doesn’t allow COVID positive patients anyways, and we dropped the mask mandate a month after this happened, but instead I kept getting told I needed permission from a PCP. So I went to a Fairview PCP, was told I had to do an EKG and echocardiogram, and after doing this I got a bill for $600 for the Echocardiogram, even though we’ve already hit our deductible. I 100% realize health insurance companies reflect the economy, but they took away different perks, increased rates on everything in one year, and I can’t go to some places now because United Healthcare pays providers so poorly. As anyone that watches the news knows how Fairview has continued to lose 100s of millions since COVID, just like most major healthcare companies in Minnesota, but Health Partners, Allina, HCMC, have all bounced back. I’m not normally a conspiracy kind of person but I find it suspicious that in 2016 the current CEO of Fairview, James Hereford, left his job with Sanford as their COO, and since then has basically ran Fairview into the ground but continues to receive a HUGE salary and bonuses, and then all of a sudden last year Sanford swoops in right at a time when the company is going broke. Sanford aand Fairview also attempted to merge about 10 years ago but the state stepped in, just like they had to do recently by literally creating a law banning mergers between companies that would create such a monopoly over healthcare (especially in rural areas where there already are such few options), and not to mention gain ownership of the East & Weat Bank hospitals which gets most of their providers and research funneled through a public entity (U of MN). So I’m just going to put it out there, I truly believe that James Hereford was hired specifically to run Fairview into the ground, just to make it easier for Sanford to take over, hike up the prices on care in areas where many people with lower socioeconomic status live, and then James gets to leave with big bag of cash.
Cons
Management constantly changing strategies, adding irrelevant job duties, and taking no accountability when things go poorly. I have seen the most unprofessional conduct in my career in the past few months, specifically in regard to therapists, psych associates, and all the other “grunt” workers, being repeatedly denied the right to share their concerns about changes in the workplace that are creating more stress for workers. On top of that, one upper management staff consistently talks to us like we are idiots, invalidates are feeling, and literally told us some Big Brother BS about not complaining because then it makes us feel negative, and we don’t all want to start hating our jobs and feeling like we hate our lives when we leave. Not even joking. It was so demeaning and it has become really hard to see my colleagues who work their butts off, working with very mentally Ill people that can become violent, and slowly getting beat down.
