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Posted at kaiserthrive.org:

Kaiser Permanente’s Prominent Role in American Health Care Deform

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 PRBS 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]

The less care they give them the more money they make.

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.

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