Over the last week I've toured the health care blogosphere to express my concerns about the recent Healthcare Blogging Summit. My chief concern was that the Summit reinforced the credibility of PR bloggers and other professionals (physicians, lawyers, consultants, etc.) who already enjoy the advantage of being backed by corporate resources and favored by the mainstream media - while helping to further marginalize and suppress bloggers who are trying to criticize corporate heavyweights. The focus of blog-inclusive news aggregators like Memeorandum and Tailrank on A-List blogs has further served to magnify the blogs blessed by the business world while reducing the potential of the blogosphere as a whole of serving as a vehicle for alternative points of view.

To my surprise, several of the organizers of the Healthcare Blogging Summit responded to my concerns thoughtfully, and they had actually hoped for more representation of alternative and critical viewpoints on the panels. One organizer, Fard Johnmar, interviewed me.

Fard also points out Kaiser's recent foray into "blogger relations":

Kaiser is very interested in working with bloggers and may even deploy its own public facing blog in the future. As a result, they are very interested in working with bloggers to communicate their position on the Deal e-mail and other issues.

Kaiser employees have also been attending blogging and social media conferences. This is part of my complaint: Kaiser is trying to hijack the platform for communication and block or swamp criticism instead of addressing it. Kaiser can throw money and hordes of employees at this endeavor: the people with the technical skills and willingness to put in herculean amounts of unpaid work to hold onto a place for alternative points of view are very, very few. Kaiser already gets to push their story through canned news. They should leave the blogosphere alone.

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In other news, Matthew Holt has started to cover Kaiser's health care plan for California. Strangely, this is not the money-grubbing plan that Kaiser CEO Halvorson proposed last month in his capacity as chairman of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Perhaps it's more geared to reinforce the proposal that Don Perata, the Dem leader of the CA Senate who also represents Oakland (re: Kaiser's HQ). Honestly, I can't tell from either article. Maybe everyone is just trying to get on the health care bandwagon, and speed of soundbyte is more important than actually making sense.

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LOL! Kaiser wants to get into the "Web 3.0 killer app" couples counselling business....?