More press!

[editor: Important correction: The site owner has never been a Kaiser employee, disgruntled or otherwise. She is a former Kaiser member, who completely lost faith in everyone at Kaiser Permanente after six years of near-constant difficulties with Kaiser’s meat-market brand of medicine. She became an advocate for Kaiser members after a surgery she needed was denied and two Kaiser physicians, who also happen to be Kaiser board members, responded to her complaint by altering her medical records to justify the denial.]

August 19, 2004 from the Oakland Tribune:

Kaiser ads ‘Thrive’ on good health (NOT!)

By Nicholas Yulico, BUSINESS WRITER

IN A NEW Kaiser Permanente television ad running during the Olympics, a picture of broccoli comes on the screen, with the commentary, “We stand for broccoli, for pilates and dental floss.” The list of approved items goes on for 20 seconds, coupled with a barrage of “healthy” images, such as cigarettes being flushed down the toilet. The commercial ends with the message, “We are Kaiser Permanente and we stand for health. May you live long and thrive.”

The commercial is one of several versions appearing on national television programs as part of Kaiser’s new $40 million “Thrive” ad campaign launched in early August.

The purpose is to spread the word about Kaiser’s benefits to land new members.

“People who are our members have a very positive view of us … We’re trying to extend that idea and that concept to others … (telling them) ‘come back, take a look at us, we have a lot to offer,'” said Matthew Schiffgens, a Kaiser spokesperson.

But one Kaiser watchdog group, Kaiser Thrive Exposed (www.kaiserthrive.org), says the ads are nothing but a public-relations sham that masks the many problems inherent to the country’s largest health maintenance organization.

A disgruntled ex-Kaiser employee who runs the site, explained the matter in an e-mail:

“The goal of Thrive is to improve the perception of Kaiser by nonmembers and decrease a national decline in membership. Kaiser claims to be correcting false negative impressions, but in my personal experience, and that of just about every Kaiser member or employee I know (current and former), Kaiser truly ‘is’ nothing more than a huge bureaucracy that cares more about saving money than providing quality patient care.”

But those criticisms aren’t warranted, said Schiffgens, the Kaiser spokesperson. He points to reports last year by the National Committee on Quality Assurance and the California Health Plan Report Card that ranked the Kaiser Northern California region as one of the top clinical providers around.

The Thrive campaign was created by Campbell-Ewald, renowned for its “Like a Rock” Chevrolet campaign, as well as the recent U.S. Navy recruitment ads.

Liz Mason, a senior vice president at Campbell-Ewald who worked on the campaign, said she is not aware of any other large HMO’s launching major ad campaigns to reposition to their brands — but grants that others may follow Kaiser’s lead.

Kaiser, she said, is launching the campaign to change perceptions among people who might not be familiar with the organization’s benefits or might have negative impressions about the company.

“HMO’s have become symbols of all that is wrong with health care,” and people are not aware of Kaiser’s benefits, she said.

The Thrive campaign is being launched right before the big fall open enrollment season when many businesses offer their employees the option to switch health plans. In the past year, Kaiser’s national membership has remained flat at about 8.2 million, and the company appears to be facing significant hurdles to achieve an increase this year.

According to an internal Kaiser document entitled “Kaiser Permanente Brand Positioning Discussion” unearthed by an ex-Kaiser employee and posted at the Kaiser Thrive Exposed Web site, 75 percent of people who are offered Kaiser Permanente probably or definitely would not consider Kaiser for their health care coverage. Kaiser officials verified the document’s authenticity.

The same document shows that Kaiser’s best chance for signing on new members is targeting “health seekers,” hence the campaign that focuses on total health and wellness measures.

In the same internal documents, Kaiser mentions that it has discovered what it deems “a striking change in the health paradigm:

“While a discussion on ‘being healthy’ generates energy and optimism, the concept of ‘health care’ generates fear, anger and loss of control.”

To cater to the “health seeker,” Kaiser has been offering a series of wellness classes for some time now, available to its members and the general public ranging from therapeutic tai chi to yoga.

But such programs, along with the ad campaign’s focus on “health” and “wellness,” don’t address the serious issues at stake in the organization, critics say.

“If nonprofit Kaiser has $40 million in patient premium dollars to burn, we suggest the money would be better spent correcting the ‘reality’ of the problems current Kaiser members are experiencing, rather than pushing the mere illusion of quality care and concern on nonmembers,” Wolf wrote in her e-mail.

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Kaiser interestingly waves around NCQA quality ratings in response to our criticism. Since the word quality can have many different meanings for people, and Kaiser states in the Thrive documents that it deliberately attempts to take advantage of fuzzy meanings, we would like to establish that quality means Kaiser’s performance based on selected statistical indicators.

On page 13 of Kaiser’s Reputation Management document, which is the basis for the Thrive campaign, Kaiser points out to its own staff that no one relates these ratings to Kaiser’s trustworthiness of quality of care. So why are the Kaiser PR Pushers invoking NCQA now?

On page19 of the same internal document, Kaiser states the following:

“Consumers are skeptical about health care organizations and don’t believe what they say”

“KP is not viewed positively on trustworthy and quality health care because our physicians are perceived to be ‘Kaiser doctors,’ employed by Kaiser, beholden to Kaiser and therefore not in a position to be an advocate for their patients.”

Need we say more? Kaiser Permanente is notoriously unresponsive to member complaints and employee grievances, and by nature is a system in which it is impossible for anyone to “Thrive.”