Comments on: Kaiser NW fined $65,000 for illegally denying emergency room claims

By: Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed » New Kaiser Permanente Thieves ad parody

Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed » New Kaiser Permanente Thieves ad parody — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:16:27 +0000

[...] Enjoy this parody of one of Kaiser’s new animated Flash Thrive ads that has been appearing in Yahoo mailboxes everywhere: [...]

By: Admin

Admin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:29:49 +0000

Kaiser Hawaii has been losing money (and members) for awhile, so they are scrambling to cut costs. They tell the reporters that patients won’t be affected by the penny pinching, but to put it bluntly: they are lying.

By: Laola

Laola — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:59:27 +0000

Interesting, illegally denying emergency claims also happens in Hawaii. It was a battle appealing my husbands E.R.claim denial. We thought it was a heartattack he was having, when it turned out to be a bad reaction to a diet pill. Which may sound petty, but it was serious enough symptoms to be referred by a Kaiser advice nurse to go to the E.R., but yet later they tried to get out of paying?! Our E.R. doctor told us it was the right thing to do to come in like we did and because he is at an outside urgent care hospital contracted with Kaiser’s after hours treatment of members, he had no trouble backing us up. We were really fortunate. Ridiculous I tell you…Kaiser is dumb.

By: Admin

Admin — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 16:30:09 +0000

Funny, not five minutes before that last comment was posted by someone with a Kaiser Permanente IP address, someone else said Kaiser would scapegoat the individual physician and pretend it had no idea this was going on. Oops!

I’d like to see an audit of ER claim denials in all Kaiser regions. Would a pattern emerge?

Regarding Kaiser screwing over the public, we’re not acting. Did you take a look around?

By: Ridge Green

Ridge Green — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:26:32 +0000

It’s a sad day when we have to blame an entire organization for what appears to be a simple error in judgement by an employee. I would think that paying the fine and correcting their practice would be enough, rather than acting like Kaiser is out there screwing over the public.

By: Admin

Admin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:14:03 +0000

No one is supposed to be turned away with chest pains without being evaluated but it does happen. Years ago in Las Vegas I remember a homeless man was turned away from an ER and he keeled over and died on the grass outside of the hospital two minutes later.

Kaiser breaking the law again is hardly surprising. What is really telling is that a law like this has to exist in the first place. There are no real ethics remaining in health care.

$65k divided by 299 patients is only $217 per person. It costs more than that to walk in an ER door. It’s a lame punishment and hardly a deterrent to more hanky panky. Kaiser only gets caught for a small percentage of its illegal antics and will always see cheating its members and breaking the law as a cost saving strategy IMO.

Waiting with baited breath for the DMHC to announce the fine for the kidney transplant debacle.

By: gadfly

gadfly — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:29:40 +0000

I wonder if other states have laws like these?

Also, I wonder how this effects ER policy? Is the person with chest pains, but no Kaiser coverage, turned away because it “might” be indigestion? My understanding is that Kaiser cheated the statistics to get a lower heart attack mortality rate by excluding people who die before they get to the ER…