I made it to the Heathcare Blogging Summit, and my panel went well. Kaiser had been approached about sending a representative to participate on the panel, but apparently I scared them away. :D
There is a lot of talk about transparency and relating to bloggers, but I still get the sense that the health care industry is mostly interested in how to control or discredit bloggers. Matthew Holt thought that some areas of Kaiser had started to tiptoe in the direction of transparency, but I haven't seen one iota of evidence of this. Kaiser continues to use the same tactics against Justen Deal that they did with me: attempting to depict him as a hacker, fabricating reasons to justify firing him, etc.
I was intrigued to find out that Kaiser is still retaining Edelman as one of their PR firms - confirmed by Rick Murray, President of Edelman's new social media practice Me2Revolution. I wonder if Kaiser's contract with Edelman is specifically to manage the response to Justen Deal, or whether its about asserting more control over the social media environment in general. Expect to see Kaiser's virtual headquarters hosting events in Second Life soon.
There has been a lot of Kaiser news over the last month that I haven't been able to keep up with. I'd like to nudge people who are interested in keeping up with patient advocacy issues to check out www.kaiserthrive.org. I will be writing a big catch-up post, too.
One thing I have to mention, though, is that Justen Deal's story made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
More to come later...
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The U.S. government is going to bat for health care fraud whistleblowers. It's a Christmas miracle!
The funniest part of that article is where representatives of the health care industry disassociate "technical non-compliance" from breaking the law.
I'm now taking bets on how long it will take Kaiser to implode under the weight of it's own enablement of "technical non-compliance". Kaiser already has a policy of non-retaliation: it's just that neither managers or their HR advisors follow that policy. Right now it's just too easy to destroy or insert evidence to hide the retaliation. What I'd like to see is Kaiser publicly admit that this is their problem and take steps to protect their most vulnerable employees in the future and make an honest attempt to remedy some of the retaliation that they've allowed managers to conduct in the past. The consequences of Kaiser's past bad acts isn't going to go away: it's just going to lead to more efforts like Grassley's to implement public oversight.
Also, NYCEve - a "citizen journalist" that writes about health care for the Daily Kos - had named Justen Deal a Hero of 2006. Thank you for taking note of what Kaiser does to whistleblowers, NYCEve!
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Late Friday evening, Justen received an email from HR leader Wayne Cassard of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan that attempted to bully him into an interrogation "investigative interview" without the benefit of counsel or a written record. This email THREATENED to convert Justen to unpaid administrative leave if he didn't comply.
Note that Justen does not actually work for KFHP (he works for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group which contracts with KFHP), and the email was issued late Friday with a Monday deadline in a blatant attempt to reduce the time Justen would have to seek advice.
Justen opted not to participate in this ham-handed attempt at a set up, and thus he was placed on "unpaid leave" yesterday (Tuesday, Dec. 19). Unpaid leave is an interesting concept: if Kaiser retains any authority to compel him, does that constitute slavery? If Kaiser is no longer acting as Justen's employer, then he has been effectively terminated and should have an iron-clad wrongful termination claim, given Kaiser's published "non-retaliation" policies.
Justen has now issued a statement about his experience with Kaiser's faux investigation procedures. The most interesting revelation is that Kaiser CEO George Halvorson pushed to retaliate against Justen immediately, but Justen's employer demurred and attempted to insulate itself from the wrongful termination issues. Halvorson's crew then put together their own investigation so they could circumvent and preempt SCPMG's HR procedures. In Justen's words:
On November 3, George Halvorson demanded that I be terminated immediately. In an attempt to limit its legal liability, my employer, SCPMG refused. Instead, KFHP is now taking advantage of essentially-complete leeway to attempt to threaten and coerce my "compliance" with a process that I have reasonably objected to and that, I believe, is being conducted with little integrity and even less objectivity.
...It is clear to me that it is time for our organization to ensure that the interests of Kaiser Permanente are being protected, not the interests of George Halvorson.
...If you believe, as I do, that my employer, the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, must ensure that this process is conducted thoroughly, accurately, and objectively, with integrity and honesty, then please, share your concerns with the SCPMG Board of Directors, and please ask them to step in to ensure these problems are immediately corrected. Please email Dean Chang, secretary of the SCPMG Board of Directors, or call his office at 626 405-6287.
I would like to point out that Justen's experience with Kaiser are COMMON and WIDESPREAD. Kaiser's efforts to wear Justen down by drawing out the investigation process, to isolate Justen and game his disadvantages, to retaliate against Justen and whip out the overt threats when more discreet attempts at bullying failed - these tactics have all been experienced by many other workers AND patients who are subjected to Kaiser's rigged arbitration system. This persistant bad behavior of Kaiser's is what is fueling the complaints, the blogging, and the desperate attempts to put aside arbitration and file real lawsuits against Kaiser.
I hope Justen's brave decision to allow the email from Cassard to be published and present his own account of Kaiser's bully tactics over the past two months will raise public awareness about these problems. Better yet, I hope the public is stirred to OUTRAGE as they finally realize how Kaiser's organizational problems damage patient care and drive up the cost of health care for everyone.
Update: Kaiser is responding to media questions about the retaliation against Justen with lame prepared statements.
Update 2: In light of the IRS questions being raised, Kaiser employees who have access to accounting-related evidence might want to think about whether they're in a position to bring a qui tam suit. Just recently another Kaiser employee got $225,000 out of a qui tam action.
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