Candidate Profile: Mike Pellicciotti, Running for 30th District House Position 2

Mike Pellicciotti has spent the last three years combating healthcare provider fraud and elder abuse/neglect as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Washington. For eight years before that, he served as a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for King County.

Pellicciotti’s efforts to combat knowingly-committed fraud in Washington’s health care system have returned more than $30M to the Medicaid program.

“For the last few years, I have been focused on improving our health care system, especially corporate efforts to put profits over patients,” Pellicciotti said in his candidate questionnaire. “For example, I led our State’s efforts against the Extendicare corporation to hold the international corporation responsible for inadequate nursing staffing levels.”

As a State Representative, Pellicciotti said he would “focus on the training and education of more nursing, and holding corporations accountable for low staffing levels and putting patients over profits.”

Pellicciotti understands the critical role nurses play as “the infrastructure” of the health care system. “They are on the front line with patients,” he said in his questionnaire. “They are first, and sometimes the last, means of delivering competent and reliable medical care. They serve as the protector of quality care and ensure appropriate scope of care is delivered by all health care providers.”

Pellicciotti indicated his support for all of WSNA’s primary issues, including policy efforts that would establish minimum nurse staffing standards as well as those that would require hospitals to implement a staffing plan developed jointly by direct care nurses and the hospital administration.