Banner Week for Kaiser Negligence, Corruption, and Fraud
During the past couple of weeks, Kaiser has confirmed three patient deaths caused by medical error. This spate of incidents have come to light in conjunction with the discovery that Kaiser rewarded Dr. Patel despite escalating malpractice claims and the suspicious deaths of at least five of his patients in the U.S. Update: Kaiser has now admitted to four medical error deaths. Kaiser wouldn't comment when asked whether there are more that they haven't reported yet.

It will be interesting to watch how Kaiser attempts to worm their way out of this. Kaiser never takes responsibility for what harm they do to people, and Kaiser's spinmeisters aren't above lying and revictimizing the people they've harmed as they engage in "Issues Management". Kaiser has yet to answer for trying to frame me - they haven't so much as apologized. As far as Kaiser is concerned, lying works: neither government nor public opinion has yet discouraged them.

The woman who runs Kaiser Papers Hawaii has struggled for 2 1/2 YEARS to bring to light Kaiser's substandard care and subsequent record tampering. She was burdened with amassing documentation to prove her case, forced to tell her traumatic story over and over, and subjected to the nasty, derogatory comments of Kaiser's representatives. The relevant government agency, Hawaii's Insurance Division, seems just as uninterested in helping people as California's Department of Managed Health Care. Here's an article by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that sheds some light on Kaiser's brutal treatment of women in labor. Her story is not unique: everyone with a Kaiser complaint has been through such lengthy, demeaning, costly, and often useless bureaucratic procedures. This system is obviously geared to discourage people from complaining about Kaiser rather than addressing their complaints. Even if the medical problem is ultimately fixed, people never get redress for the time, effort, and insulting treatment involved in simply filing a complaint.

While the public is distracted by Kaiser's mounting death count, no one seems to be paying much attention to the slow-boiling issue of Kaiser outsourcing. While Kaiser denies outsourcing medical transcription overseas, 35% of transcription in Northern California alone get contracted out to the notorious MedQuist and other outside agencies. When Kaiser claims it doesn't outsource transcription, it's like Bush saying that the U.S. armed forces are adhering to the Geneva Convention because they are hiring consultants to do all the torture.

Kaiser has been using the threat of outsourcing to crank up quota demands on its own in-house typing slaves. The fix is in. As in-house transcriptionists flee poor working conditions, Kaiser pleads that their "inability" to retain qualified transcriptionists "forces" them to outsource. Kaiser has been using its acclaimed "Labor-Management Collusion" to exclude workers from all union bargaining and present them with sets of "non-negotiable demands".

Kaiser has also been busy adding subjective criteria to transcriptionist performance reviews such as "team participation," "cooperative attitude," and "not being divisive by faction-building." This gives Kaiser managers a way to arbitrarily fire people for union activity (as well as supplying a pretext for racial discrimination, etc.). There needs to be a curse on the head on whoever gave Big Business the idea to use pop psychology to circumvent all existing worker's rights.

I just read an article that pointed out twice as many people lose their jobs for ostensible "personality problems" as performance issues. Who wants to bet a good many of the performance issues were actually bald-faced lies to cover up for managers with personality problems? Sadly the article notes the corporate rush to use personality tests to promote conformity: this is just going to make the problem worse as the corporate ranks fill with sociopaths who blithely beat such tests, while good workers who are honest about their personality quirks get weeded out. Also, since managers always provide one half of the personality conflict, why are corporations putting yet more discretionary power in their hands? While the people who do the work are treated as expendable, managers are being rewarded for abrasive, retaliatory, and corrupt behavior.

I ask people who read this to urge their political representatives to take action to make Kaiser accountable. Find your political representatives here. Kaiser currently has no incentive at all to do the right thing: all they do is trot out their Issues Management team and attempt to manipulate public perceptions. Kaiser won't bother to check in with their conscience as long as they think this approach works.