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, [...]
A year ago this week, Kaiser Permanente was called to task for its practice of rescission, the retroactive termination of health insurance coverage. In many cases, coincidentally, Kaiser Permanente and other insurers will initiate a rescission investigation when someone has just been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps a serious and expensive illness.
Now that [...]
The New York Times is wondering out loud whether the electronic health “cost savings” emperor has an empty wardrobe:
Saving money can be expensive.
Indeed, the quest to save dollars in the nation’s $2.1 trillion annual health care bill is becoming a lucrative market of its own. Thousands of companies, large and small, are pitching cost-saving ideas [...]
If Kaiser Permanente was a for-profit, publicly traded company, it would come in at number 63, by revenue, on the 2007 Fortune 500 listing, just ahead of The Walt Disney Company.
In fact, as a not-for-profit organization, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals raked in considerably more profit (on a net income basis) last [...]
The increasing cost of healthcare in America can be attributed to a number of causes, but for many of us, the growing presence of computers at our doctor’s offices adds more to our monthly premiums than we might care to know about.
Kaiser Permanente is on track to spend over $2.6 billion this year on information [...]