Pidok T.

Denville, NJ

I began working at the Hospital Center at Orange as a full time emergency room physician in 1975. The wage was somewhat lower than the nearby hospitals but the administration promised to provide pension benefits equal to 2% of the wage per year and insured by PBGC. I accepted the offer and settled down and worked with this hospital until its closure. The hospital ran into financial problems and was subsequently taken over by Cathedral Healthcare System (CHS) in 1998. Two years later, the contribution to pension benefit was suspended because of the precarious financial situation. In 2003, CHS announced its intention to close the hospital for good. During one of the meetings to notify the hospital closing, one of the employees asked about the pension plan and was unable to get straight answers from the hospital representative. However, following the subsequent meetings, under intense questioning, it became clear that the administration had transferred the pension benefits plan from PBGC to a new non-insured "Church Plan" which apparently is not obliged to report the status of the plan to its participants or anybody. I believe that the administrator of any pension plan has a fiduciary duty to protect the interest of the pensioners but instead, the transfer was done in secrecy and even after the facts became known the administration made no attempt to clarify and educate the employees of the new "Church Plan". A few months later I sent a certified mail requesting an annual summary plan description without success.

I was somewhat luckier than some of my colleagues because in 2002, when I turned 60, I put in the application for distribution of my benefit and naturally selected the option of" wife as beneficiary". This means that the monthly benefits would be substantially reduced (by almost 40%) but I thought for the sake of my wife and two young children (12 y/o twins) it would be worth it. Should they have let me know at the time of the application that the plan was not under PBGC, I would naturally have selected the option of "single-no beneficiary" which would pay much more benefits. As a result, I now have to work part-time to support my family and save for children's education.

I personally respect all the religions and Catholic religion is no exception. I know that they try to help people. However, the people the organization hired behaved more like a gang of thieves or worse, mafia. They acted in a dishonest manner, disregarded the employee's rights, showed no common human decency and degraded all of us. It is not right to downgrade their promised benefits that were accumulated over the years without consulting them, let alone notifying them. The CHS took over the hospital, cut down employees' pays, stopped contributing to their pensions, drained all the Orange Memorial Hospital Endowment Fund, then closed down the hospital, removing all the equipments/instruments used in the Operating Room, Cardiology Lab, CT Scan, MRI... etc, etc, etc.. to St Michael Hospital Medical Center, the CHS' flagship hospital. The similar patterns of taking over then closing down also occurred with Columbus Hospital and St James' Hospital in Newark. Furthermore, a year prior to being taken over, the Hospital Center at Orange was planning to build a new medical building and requested contributions from the medical staff and all the employees to the tune of several million dollars. The money was supposed to be used only for construction and nothing else. Since the building was never constructed, the money should have been returned to us. It is anyone's guess where the money had gone.

In regard to the almighty IRS, I now understand their power. With a single stroke of pen, they can destroy the livelihood of hundreds or even thousands of families, just like that! I am not sure why they have so much authority to destroy and negate the cost of insurance that the Hospital Center at Orange had been religiously paying to PBGC for many, many years past. In 1998, when the hospital was on the brink of bankruptcy with no more contribution to the pension plan and eventually taken over by CHS, the situation, though not on paper, was in reality a bankruptcy and thus, by laws, obligated the PBGC to take over the pension responsibility. By permitting the CGS to convert to Church Plan, the IRS effectively and possibly illegally relieved PBGC of all the obligations due the pensioners. This is not only injustice but extreme cruelty. I believed the fairest thing to do is for the IRS to reverse its permission to let CHS convert to Church plan and let the PBGC take over our pension plan. At the minimum, if the IRS refuses to reverse its permission, the PBGC should return all the insurance premium the hospital had paid over the years and put it in the pension fund instead.