Our apologies for the dearth of updates lately, but by no means does our temporary silence indicate that the Kaiser Krappola hasn’t continued to hit the fan. There’s too much to post individually, so please enjoy this Kaiser Permanente News Roundup:

Now that Kaiser has completed the nationwide roll out of the outpatient side of its [...]

From KTVU.com:
LOS ANGELES — A surgeon with close ties to the Bay Area was charged Monday with prescribing excessive drugs to a comatose, disabled patient to hasten his death and harvest his organs for transplantation.
It’s the first such criminal case against a transplant doctor in the United States, the San Luis Obispo County district attorney’s [...]

[kaiserthrive.org's editor's note: Is this vindication for Kaiser critics, who have been making these claims for years only to be erroneously discredited, abused and marginalized by Kaiser management and its less than ethical PR and legal departments? Feels a little like vindication, but in our experience these people seem to regret their horrendous actions quite a bit less than they do being caught.

We received an email from a Kaiser employee a few days ago, asking us if we would be willing to post some tangible steps that Kaiser could take to improve itself, as well as a score card listing some of these steps and how Kaiser is doing with implementing them. Kaiser makes a point of pretending it doesn't respond to anything we do, even though we know for a fact that isn't true, but in the spirit of supporting what is best for Kaiser members, we are more than willing to report on positive steps in the right direction. We're still hoping to find even one Kaiser member or employee who has been treated fairly in a dispute, and as soon as that happens it will be our pleasure to report it here.]

From the L.A. Times:

State fines Kaiser again — The HMO’s second such penalty in a year targets its handling of patient complaints at nine hospitals. [...]

[kaiserthrive.org editor's note: Hallelujah, regulators have finally seen the light! Too bad Kaiser will respond with another useless 'plan of correction', with no real intentions of actually following through with it.]
From San Francisco Business Times:
DMHC probe of Kaiser delayed, fines expected
by Chris Rauber
An investigation of Kaiser Permanente by the state Department of Managed Health [...]

[...] It should be noted that although Halvorson admitted that Kaiser screwed up, they have behaved just as despicably in the handling of the investigation and lawsuits as they always do. The fact that the only people who were fired from the program were those who tried to advocate for the patients, reveals the huge discrepancy between what Kaiser says and what they do. [...]

From the Los Angeles Times:
Authorities investigate allegations that a Kaiser surgeon in San Luis Obispo hastened a possible donor’s demise.
By Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, Times Staff Writers
February 28, 2007
Police are investigating whether a Kaiser Permanente transplant surgeon attempted to hasten the death last February of a 26-year-old San Luis Obispo man on life support [...]

From San Francisco Business Times:
Kaiser whistleblower settles lawsuit over abrupt firing ? Merlin asked Kaiser for $5 million in damages
by Chris Rauber
David Merlin, the former administrative director of Kaiser Permanente?s troubled Northern California kidney transplant unit, has settled his wrongful termination lawsuit against Kaiser following a Dec. 18 arbitration hearing.
Merlin lost his job in February [...]

From the Los Angeles Times:
Discipline meted out to Kaiser — Transplant oversight group drops ‘good standing’ rating seven months after the HMO closes kidney program in San Francisco.
By Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, Times Staff Writers
December 14, 2006
TUCSON ? Seven months after Kaiser Permanente announced that it was closing its problem-plagued kidney transplant program in [...]

From CBS5.com:
(AP) SAN FRANCISCO — A national organ transplant association criticized Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Medical Center Wednesday for mismanaging its kidney transplant program.
The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network declared the medical center to be a “member not in good standing” because it “effectively denied patient access to kidney transplantation and threatened safety for patients [...]

From the Los Angeles Times:
By Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, Times Staff Writers
October 11, 2006
Kaiser Permanente’s disgraced San Francisco kidney transplant program had failed to remove the names of 90 dead patients from the national waiting list for organs, state officials discovered after the program shut down amid scandal in May.
Kaiser acknowledged Tuesday that it [...]