The impending release of Michael Moore’s scathing indictment of the US Health Care industry, ‘SiCKO’ — which features one Kaiser Permanente scandal after another — has the Kaiser PR goons working overtime. With their usual intent to baffle, befuddle and bamboozle, they would like to convince you to disbelieve what you see and hear with your own eyes and ears.
According to Raw Story:
The film’s most interesting scene is an archived White House conversation between then-President Richard Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman that Moore argues is the starting point of the modern healthcare complex. In the Feb. 7, 1971 recording — part of the hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret White House tapes — Ehrlichman explains “health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser’s Permanente thing.” Kaiser Permanente is now the nation’s largest HMO.
“Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. … All the incentives are toward less medical care,” Ehrlichman says to Nixon, according to a transcript. “The less care they give them, the more money they make.”
But…but…but… Ehrlichman got it all wrong, Kaiser says in its official response:
John Ehrlichman, in a 1971 conversation with President Richard Nixon that’s used in the film, crudely and inaccurately paraphrases a conversation he had with Edgar Kaiser. Ehrlichman’s distorted paraphrase badly misrepresents Kaiser Permanente, its goals, its strategy, and its not-for-profit model. A Kaiser Permanente “Health Care Memorandum to John Ehrlichman,” stored in the National Archives, clearly supports this, as does this National Archives White House briefing document.
Using a secondhand, inarticulate paraphrase to represent KP’s role in the health care reform thinking of an era is a sad distortion of the truth.
Welcome to Kaiser Tactico Numero Uno: Scapegoating the Messenger. The message itself is indefensible, so Kaiser blames everything on "crude and inarticulate" Ehrlichman, and pretends to be every bit as shocked and disgusted by his conversation with Nixon as the rest of us. The links to the National Archives are also a nice touch, because as everyone knows, when corrupt politicians and businessmen are hatching their evil plots to defraud the American public, they are meticulous about including evidence of their illegal actions in the official Memoranda. [@@<---rolls eyes]
Hmm. Not too much to misunderstand about that, and of course we know that contrary to the PRBS, Kaiser does indeed withhold necessary medical care to increase its profits ($698 million in the first quarter of 2007 alone).
Conversely, money appears to be no object when it comes to really important things, like Kaiser’s advertising budget, or the enormous legal fees it routinely shells out to defend its despicable actions.
Michael Moore also tells the story of Mychelle Williams, an eighteen month old child who died of a treatable infection because her Kaiser doctor refused to authorize emergency treatment at a non-Kaiser hospital. On his blog, Justen Deal (another Kaiser scapegoat) directs us to The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights for the rest of the story:
The facts in Mychelle’s case are harrowing: An ambulance picked the little girl up from her grandmother’s Compton home in May 1993 and took her to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, the nearest hospital.
Dr. Trach Phoung Dang then gave Mychelle medication for her fever and other ailments and intravenous liquids for dehydration. He wanted to run blood tests to determine why the feverish, limp girl, who her mother said had been fine just hours earlier, was now so desperately ill. But the girl’s family belonged to the Kaiser health maintenance organization, and Kaiser’s Dr. Brian Thompson repeatedly told King/Drew that the tests should be done at Kaiser.
The telephone conversations between the doctors were tape-recorded by Kaiser, and according to a petition filed with the high court, Dang suggested three times that King do the tests before a transfer.
As the little girl’s condition deteriorated, her mother, Dawnelle Keys, now 37, pleaded with doctors for more aggressive treatment. But the child could not be given antibiotics until after a blood test, and wasn’t given the blood test because Kaiser wanted to do the tests
By the time the toddler reached Kaiser — four hours after she arrived at King — she was near death. Her heart stopped about 20 minutes later, and she could not be revived.
Justen then goes on to describe Kaiser’s response, which brings us to their 2nd Favorite PRBS Trick: Lie, Distort & Deny (and why not try to sell a few books while they’re at it…):
Kaiser Permanente’s defense? Mychelle died "14 years ago. [Her death] was not [as a result of] the denial of coverage for necessary medical care, as the movie claims."
The jury said the evidence showed otherwise, and found Kaiser Permanente liable for $338,250.
You can’t help but feel heartbroken for this poor little girl’s family. Well, unless you’re [Kaiser Permanente CEO] George Halvorson. You can’t help but feel disgusted that Mr. Halvorson would try to use (a fabrication) of this little girl’s story to sell his book. What a truly respectable "thought leader" Kaiser Permanente has in George Halvorson
NOT.
SiCKO opens Friday, June 29th, and we hope everyone will go see it. Then you can decide for yourselves whether Kaiser Permanente can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.
I have seen SiCKO. To be perfectly honest, due to Moore’s other movies who have had large portions of them debunked, I find it hard to beleieve much of what he says. However, the Mychelle story was pretty clear cut. It is very, very sad. It is even more sad to see that Halvorsen would try to lie about it, considering KP LOST a lawsuit. I mean come on. What, did he go ask someone in PR about “What happened” and then blindly repeat whatever they told him? He probably doesnt even know anything about what really happened.
What is the title of the mystery document? Which branch of the National Archives is the mystery document located?
I don’t think that Kaiser realizes how easy it is to disprove the statement that they have made. While I am writing, The Permanente Medical Group was ordered by Congress over a decade ago to annually submit a report on how they are paid and how much. They had not been doing that recently and The National Archives is unable to locate any copy of their having ever done so. I wonder what the mystery is titled and where it really stored if it exists.
“I am not a crook” posted below Halvorson’s mugshot. Priceless.
He should make that the cover of his book..
I am not a crook. Reform healthcare now. Then reform me.
For anyone who has been victimized by Kaiser and their witholding of care for profit, we know what the truth is. Experience is the best teacher. I TRULY hope that this movie wakes the public up to the fact of what kaiser really is, for profit and for profit only. Even Kaisers own employees get shoddy care, just ask Andrew Brewer who moved his family cross country to work for kaiser and lost his Baby because Kaiser witheld care. So much for loyalty to their employees and to their members. Talk about greed. Where’s the heart here? There is none. Kaiser really does suck, we’ve got the first hand experience. Save yourself the grief and don’t go there. Anyone who could run a company based on this philosophy is a crook.
The victims cannot dispute this fact and kaiser has created too many victims.
I just saw SiCKO. From what my family has experienced with Kaiser, I’d say he’d barely scratched the surface of how greedy and rotten they really are. (A Kaiser Kidney Transplant victim – still 10 years no kidney & kicked off Kaiser & sueing)
Someone should do a movie on just Kaiser, to highlight the greed, corruption,illegal activity, lack of accountablity, and lack of concern for whether people live or die as long as the hot shots make another buck.
I absolutely agree. In my opinion, Kaiser STARTED the downslide of healthcare and healthcare for profit and all of the illegal activities that goes along with covering up their corrupt business practice. They started it all and in turn gave other healthcare facilities and insurance companies the immoral push to do the same.
The cancerous evil has now spread far and wide.
Any business who could be so calloused and greedy doesn’t belong out in the public “serving” the public. They should be shut down and replaced with human beings with compassion and a need to do right.
I think everyone should put up a free anecdotal website of just one page about their negative medical experiences, like this new one:
http://www.freewebs.com/mykaisernightmare/
One of the arguments made against “sicko” is that it promotes socialized medicine and is just more “liberal whining”. The hard line argument by many conservative critics is that if we go to a system like Canada’s then we will all wait in line for weeks on end and no one will ever get care and then we will all be in the fields harvesting wheat and making substandard toaster ovens in some post-Stalinist nightmare world.
Could it just be that capitalism without checks and balances is fundamentally “different” than what the US once was and the idea of regulatory, best practice oversight is not a bad thing but instead the basis upon which we can make things better?
The concept that government “involvement” in an issue is analogous to communism seems, to me, to be a very weak argument. There is government involvement in every area of our lives–checks and balances is the positive term, government interference is the negative.
Why can’t I drive 90 mph through a school district? Why do I have to have my kids vaccinated just so they can go to 3rd grade? Why do I have confine myself to just one wife; why not three or four or as many as my income will allow?
These are examples of “regulations” (instituted and “controlled” by the government) and I don’t think this is a novel concept that they exist and, hopefully, they are put into place in order to help make the “system” work “better” for the common good.
What is happening, I believe, with health care is that the “idea” of what one gets with insurance turns out to be in variance with what one often times receives. In both socialized medicine countries and the US there is a distinct stratification at work.
Whether one is excluded due to volume or due to income, in both systems there will be those who suffer and those who prosper and there are limitations to both.
If Insurance Companies and other health care providers actually provided the services they “advertise” and contractually agree to then this would just be a question of rich vs poor and a different line of argumentation would likely follow.
But the most important issue (in my opinion) is that health care providers are taking advantage of a system that allows for profit taking (by many that have nothing to do with actually providing care but instead serve only in administrative capacities) to the detriment–in many cases this is life threatening–of the people who pay for their services.
Why, if I am a manufacturer, should I put decent brakes on motorcycles if I can make them at a higher profit with sub-standard ones? Why build the house to code if the likelihood of fire seems so remote? These lines of argumentation are no different than asking “why don’t you provide a level of service that meets acceptable, agreed upon standards”?
The issue is not that Canada is better or worse. The issue is that the system in the US does not work and whether or not one implements “socialized medicine” or not is not nearly as important as making the current system better and providing a level of oversight and control that supports better service to the consumer/patient.
Kaiser’s fingerprints–as evidenced by the tape with President Nixon–are on the smoking gun. The forensics are, to me, pretty clear.
Right now, health care in the US is broken. This “intervention” by Kaiser back in the early ’70’s certainly helped “break it”. I remember being a kid in the 60’s when you could still go to the doctor and not have to sell the house in order to do it. It is certainly not that way any more!!
SOMETHING has to happen; the status quo is no longer a viable option and if “sicko” brings awareness to this issue and initiates a dialogue and critical assessment of current state, then this is a positive thing.
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