With all the recent scandals at Kaiser Permanente, such as the Kidney Transplant Debacle and The Mystery of the Missing Dead Baby, we thought it would be a good time to revisit our roots: namely Kaiser’s Thrive ad campaign.
The short version for new visitors is that Kaiser Colorado — the region in charge of the Thrive campaign — lost its knickers in a little security blunder, when weeks before the campaign launched they left all of Kaiser’s $40 million market research and advertising materials exposed on the Internet, outside of the corporate firewall, for all the world to see. I guess they thought the world wasn’t looking, but we were, and it made us famous (see the sidebar for links to the documents).
The parody below is our favorite: a Flash animation designed by our friend at CorpHQ, which pokes a little fun at Kaiser broccoli-pushing and depicts what is more likely to happen to you if you choose Kaiser as your health plan. Need convincing? We invite you to check out a few hundred Kaiser Permanente Horror Stories here.
Click on the broccoli to play the animation, and enjoy the rest of the hysterically funny Kaiser Thrive Ad Parodies here.
Update June 1, 2006:
From the L.A. Times — State regulators are investigating Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California operation for allegedly deceptive marketing practices… Full Story
Kaiser Thrive Exposed would like to personally thank Dr. Geoff Galbraith - Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute board member; and Vice President, Hawaii Permanente Medical Group, Quality Improvement Management - for inspiring us to create this website. Did we make it into the top 5?
LOL! Even though I made that, Kaiser Splat just never gets old for me! Thanks for archiving the parodies.
[...] Two new member privacy breaches have been reported in the last week. Is anyone else finding Kaiser’s typical canned response that it takes “protecting the privacy and security of our members’ personal medical information seriously” a little difficult to believe, much like its empty advertising claims? [...]
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Kaiser Permanente breaches member privacy — again & again