I posted last week that membership growth at Kaiser Permanente has crumbled for the past three quarters, down 75% so far this year, a seemingly significant fact that was buried six paragraphs down in the quarterly press release. The news only gets worse from there, sadly. While potential new members are staying far, far away from Kaiser Permanente, George Halvorson has cut reinvestment in healthcare delivery and hospital infrastructure by $100 million so far this year.
That cut is a critical blow to Kaiser Permanente’s healthcare and hospitals infrastructure, and it belies Mr. Halvorson’s true priorities for the organization: cut spending on care, at all costs.
The canaries in the coal mine? The rash of front-page reports over the past two years that have uncovered nightmare stories from Kaiser Permanente members and patients. From the kidney transplant program horror story to the systematic mistreatment of homeless patients, Mr. Halvorson’s drive to cut costs, at all costs, has proven a disastrous development for patient safety.
Mr. Halvorson’s devastating impact on Kaiser Permanente couldn’t be more evident than in the accreditation reports for Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California hospitals: only three of our eleven Kaiser Foundation Hospitals met the national patient safety standards for heart failure care. Three. Of eleven.
A report in the San Francisco Business Times, by Chris Rauber, couldn’t have been more on point: “Officials at the Oakland-based health-care giant said ‘ongoing efforts to address health-care delivery costs and administrative efficiencies‘ contributed to the strong financial results for the quarter.” Profit, at the expense of patient safety and member care. Profit, at all costs.
The cuts in hospital infrastructure reinvestment expose Mr. Halvorson’s misaligned priorities, but for California’s communities, the situation gets worse: he has also cut the organization’s spending on community benefit, down nearly $20 million last year. These cuts come while profits, for the not-for-profit organization, have more than doubled so far this year, up to $2.5 billion.
George Halvorson swindled HealthPartners members out of millions, and he’s doing the same thing at Kaiser Permanente. While the quality of care and patient safety standards plummet at Kaiser Permanente’s California hospitals, Mr. Halvorson is in Washington, D.C., promoting his new book and talking about European hospitals. Misaligned priorities.
Kaiser Permanente needs a chief executive officer who cares about Kaiser Permanente members. Desperately.
on Nov 15th, 2007 at 12:51
[...] What makes Kaiser Permanente different from, say, WellPoint, which owns Blue Cross of California? WellPoint has to pay federal and state income taxes, so why not Kaiser Permanente, you ask? Theoretically, the $800 million that Kaiser Permanente pays out to various community organizations makes it more charitable than WellPoint, which gives away about $300 million each year through its various foundations. Of course, WellPoint is also a publicly-traded company, with shareholders who get a cut of its $3 billion in profit each year. On the flip side, all of Kaiser Permanente’s profit is supposed to go back into the community or into its hospitals (incidentally, both areas which have seen their funding cut significantly recently). [...]