Thank you Michael Neidorff. Thank you for your commitment to your Centene family. And by family I mean your shareholders. Not the hard working people who sustain your company. The long hours. The long days. The long weeks. The long weekends. Thank you for your commitment to making money and not to the people who help drive this company to its success and profitability. Your decision to trash your entire corporate marketing department is despicable. And I say trash because you are discarding us like garbage. Discarding us, our knowledge, our passion, our experience for a small agency with no healthcare experience. You didn't even have the courage to do it yourself. You sent some strangers to tell YOUR TEAM of 100+ people that they were no longer needed. You have no idea of the talent you are discarding. You have no idea how important it is to have talented Marketers by your side. And you're doing this during a time that you don't have to. A time that your company is raking in money. During a pandemic. During a recession. After you decided to collect and infect WellCare as part of your garbage. Another company you have infected. Another company that would have been better off, that was better off, without your "help". Centene is nothing more than a virus that collects companies, infects and damages them, and moves on. You should be ashamed of your duplicitous and viperous messages of positivity, connection, and family. I hope you feel very proud as you look in the mirror. Keep looking straight ahead Mike. Don't turn around and see the bodies left behind. Thanks for your "support".
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I know in my small former area, they are bringing in consultants who are skilled (one trained me) to pick up the marketing work which is falling on non-marketing folks. I'm thinking that Neidorff and the management are needing to juice the stock price for a reason. Lowering head count is one of the few ways available to them. It could be Neidorff's departure, meeting Wall Street projections, a lender covenant, another acquisition, or prepping the company for being acquired.
Now, after you stop chuckling, think about this last one. Except for WellCare, DOJ and the states nixed payer-payer mergers. Humana may be in play, but Centene acquiring them would run into too many MA plans under one roof. CVS acquired Aetna. Walgreens–actually Walgreens Boots Alliance, a major international player in the way CVS is not–is looking at CVS Aetna and readying the war chest. WBA will be cushing out $1 billion over the next few years to Village Medical to install a few hundred full-service medical offices in Walgreens across the US. Centene would fit in a lot of different ways, including PBM, an international footprint and a care management subsidiary.
Think about it. MFN and the management get to exit with an immense payday and with a lean structure where WBA wouldn't have to pay out so much in severance. There's more but let's start here. It may not be this year, may be next, but I bet something like this is driving actions.
Amen to this post! Be glad you are getting six months severance and an extension. The 100 Centene employees that were cut first with the acquisition, got NOWHERE near this!!
We had to sign away our rights to sue, to get ANY severance. And it wasn't much. Had to preserve the cash cow for the bonuses the Senior Management got.
I put 8 long years in at Centene. This was my reward. They left my work for people who had no idea how to do it. Well, I landed something better and sleep alot better at night.
There is a special place in hell for these lying Leadership and HR people, who only care about the money.
I was from WellCare side too, in a marketing position eliminated right after the close and which ran till end of June. I was a marketing/comms embed in an operational unit which WellCare hardly understood as it came over from UAM and dealt with practice-based Medicare FFS models. Didn't compute with high-level STL marketing management that it needed specialized support, so it got none.
All I can say is no wonder they didn't replace me with another marketer if Centene senior management had this in mind. Eliminating a dedicated marketer for this unit left the operations, market-facing, biz dev, and even compliance people in that unit off on their own to pick up as best they could, adding to their already crushing workloads. I felt awful that these dedicated colleagues were getting no marketing support. Given this, perhaps my former colleagues are better off having to stand on their own–but they were using shared services and now I'm going to assume that is part of the 120+ spots eliminated as well.
I can assure you that this outsourcing is not going to end well. I trained on the agency side and as a client, have hired/fired agencies and services. This is not in any agency's DNA, particularly without controls in a highly regulated area. Doing this on the runup to AEP is s–c-dal. I can't even understand this from a cost viewpoint.
I am wondering what the operational folks in the health plan units have to say about this.
I’m on the WellCare side and was told my position was eliminated. 10 years of busting my @ss, building a team...for what? How this merger is happening is sickening. I don’t know how upper leadership and the fools in HR sleep at night. So shady, morale is tanking, and a lot of people on the WellCare side are losing trust. “Kudos” to all of you working on the integration and in charge of firing solid people like me - absolutely stellar job at being some of the biggest a-holes I’ve ever encountered in my career. We are all just numbers it seems, and we are replaceable. Great culture you’ve created, Neidorff - how is it that someone running a company with Medicaid And Medicare plans makes over $25M a year? What in the actual hell?! And Ken Birdick, WellCare was doing pretty good but I guess you are all about the money, too.
Wish severance looked like that...
This seems like a terrible arrangement for both Centene and the Agency. The decision was made by someone outside of marketing who has no idea of the amount or type of work that’s done by 120 internal marketers + 4-5 other Agencies. Meanwhile the new Agency only has ~100 people. Not sure how they’d be able to accommodate all that work even if they decided to bring on 75% of internal staff.
Have a 20m budget for AEP ...and I have no place by Nov, Prolly should not have told me in August. Bye. And all the vendors who are supposed to k–l themselves knowing their contracts are over. That was not helpful. Good luck.
Thank you to whomever wrote this. I feel it so much. I'm living it. Hope mfn finds it in his inbox.
The response to this post is entirely misinformed. No one was told they'd be paid for another six months. 60-90 days notice was given for all marketing positions within the enterprise.
I heard you are getting paid for another six months, while you keep your job. And also getting severance for another six months if you’re not placed in a new role. While millions of people didn’t get that luxury during this pandemic, you complain. I’d happily trade places with you. As for the fact you’re being replaced by an organization that has no experience, that s—s. And may he fail for that decision. But let’s be honest, you know they’ve had people implanted in everything since day one and have taken all the possible steps to rebuild what is already there.
You should be grateful to leave a company you feel so strongly to trash. Take your money and run. Good luck.