Kaiser Gave Bonuses for Denying Care
from the take-two-aspirin-and-don’t-call-us-in-the-morning dept.
Here’s one that should resonate with anyone who’s ever had to deal with a big, uncaring HMO: Kaiser Permanente, California’s largest health maintenance organization, has acknowledged that it paid bonuses to call-center employees who kept their calls with patients short and managed to talk the patients out of scheduling doctor visits. Note that these call center employees were high-school graduates with little or no medical training. Slick. With the money the company saved it was able to run lots of TV ads showing caring “doctors” handing teddy bears to cute little girl “patients,” and still had a tidy profit left over for the shareholders. Cha-ching!