Catch Up Post — Getting Rich on your Back Edition

Below are ten more Kaiser Permanente scandals from the time period when we were not regularly updating this website. Most of this information comes to us in Google News and Blog Alerts, but recently the Big G has taken it upon itself to carry water for Kaiser, and has blocked most critical websites from the Alerts. We still find them, but it requires us to go actively looking, which is obviously more time consuming. For that reason, if you ever run across an article or blog post that we haven’t reported, or see something in the news, we’re requesting that you send us an email to let us know.

If you hate censorship, and find Google’s blatant effort to bury criticism on behalf of one of its biggest advertisers as appalling as we do, then please consider walking with your fingers and using a different search engine. Hit ‘em where it hurts — in the advertising revenue. You may have noticed that we removed our own Google Ads (we never made money from them, but they covered the costs of running the site), and now you know why. We recommend DuckDuckGo for offering its users real privacy, and Bing as the next best alternative.

• KP’s Oakland hospital was fined $50,000 for a medication error involving a 90 year old man.
• Non-profit Kaiser posted $2.1 billion in profits for the year 2009. That’s the money that was left over after your health care was provided and all operating expenses were taken into account. This when people are struggling to pay ridiculously high insurance premiums and 22% of California residents are uninsured. Appalling.
• Four patients at KP hospitals in Northern California were served chicken noodle soup with fragments of glass in it. Mm mm good!
• 

  Kaiser Vallejo Surgeon Dr. Michael Meehan

  KP surgeon, Dr. Michael Meehan, was arrested on a DUI charge after a head-on crash in Napa that injured 5 people. If you receive health care at the Vallejo Medical Center you had better hope he doesn’t operate on you while drunk, because he’s still working there and he looks a little toasted in his official KP mugshot portrait, at right.
• KP was sued by the family of a 69-year-old California woman who died after consuming food contaminated with salmonella, while recovering from surgery at the Hayward facility. We always like to remind people that it is the members who ultimately pay the cost for all of these lawsuits.
• A KP Manteca registered nurse, Gerado Cuevas, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually molesting a 13 year old girl, along with another man who was also found guilty of the crime. According to an earlier article, the abuse happened more than once and was videotaped. Sickos.
• On track to exceed 2009 earnings, KP reported $706 million in net income in the first quarter of 2010 alone. And they are so proud of getting rich off of the sick and suffering that they send out a press release.
• A woman claims she was treated with such negligence in the KP emergency room that she developed ulcers the circumference of a man’s fist and lost all sensation and use of her body below her neck.
• In another outrageous breach of privacy and abuse of power, KP inserted itself into the middle of a family dispute between members. The site admins redacted the company name, but we are sure it was Kaiser because we saw it at the time.
• In a follow up to the case of Dr. Death Jayant Patel, Kaiser members ask the question, “Why wasn’t he stopped?”

More scandals to come…