Are Kaiser Permanente's execs headed to Sing Sing? San Quentin?

Last week, several of Kaiser Permanente’s patients and the "Courage Campaign," a grassroots organization in California, held a press conference where they slammed Kaiser for systematically withholding critical mental health services from patients.

During the past two years, state investigators have fined Kaiser millions of dollars for committing "serious" and "systemic" violations of state law by withholding care from thousands of mental health patients, falsifying patients' appointment records, and violating mental health parity laws. (Los Angeles Times, "California Again Slams Kaiser for Delays in Mental Health Treatment," February 24, 2015)

Kaiser's violations are also highlighted in class-action lawsuits that link the violations to multiple suicides.

Last year, Kaiser famously signed a secret agreement with its largest union, SEIU-UHW, which bars the union and its members from reporting patient-care violations to state regulators, according to a complaint NUHW filed with the California Attorney General.

What could possibly be causing Kaiser’s execs to turn their backs on patients with mental illness, who are one of our society's most vulnerable populations?

Profits, of course.

In addition… a reader has sent along a photo that offers interesting clues about the elitist corporate culture that permeates Kaiser's top echelon of fatcat execs.

 

Part of Kaiser's 17.8-acre administrative office park in Pleasanton, Calif.

The photo comes from Kaiser's administrative offices in Pleasanton, Calif., a 17.8-acre suburban campus that the HMO purchased from computer giant Oracle Corp. in 2008 for upwards of $100 million. It's a sterile, glass-enclosed, tree-lined, corporate theme park that would make most people's stomach turn.

Just a few minutes away, Kaiser's CEO Bernard Tyson owns a multi-million-dollar, 6,121-square foot house with a swimming pool out back.

So… what's the clue about Kaiser's elitist corporate culture?

Apparently, Kaiser's execs at the Pleasanton corporate park decided they could score a few laughs at the expense of America's skyrocketing incarcerated population, 40% of whom are people with mental illness.

The US’s prison crisis is not typically considered a laughing matter. 

The US has the largest incarcerated population of any country in the world (one in 99 adults are living behind bars in the US). African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.

But for Kaiser's country club execs, this is apparently a laughing matter.

At their corporate office-park utopia in aptly named Pleasanton, Kaiser decided to name the conference rooms after America's most notorious prisons: Sing Sing, San Quentin, Angola, Attica, Leavenworth, Cook County Jail, Alcatraz, etc. 

Check out the picture from Kaiser's corporate offices at 5810 Owens Drive in Pleasanton.

A list of Kaiser's conference rooms at 5810 Owens Drive, Pleasanton

Apparently, Kaiser's execs are enjoying endless laughs as its overpaid managers -- dressed in three-piece suits and armed with lattes, gold watches, and iPhones -- parade through corporate conference rooms named after the prisons housing millions of the US's most marginalized residents.

"Can you meet at 2:00pm to discuss next quarter’s profit targets?"

"Sure, where are we meeting?"

"How about Sing Sing? Or maybe you'd prefer San Quentin? In that case, ya better give the wife a heads-up cuz I hear people usually do 25 to life in San Quentin. Ha, ha, ha.”

There’s nothing quite like an arrogant HMO that decides to thumb its nose at millions of largely poor, black, brown, and mentally ill people caged inside our prisons.

Here's a humble suggestion. 

Kaiser’s execs should pull their iPhones out of their asses and read this newly published article in The Atlantic: "America's Largest Mental Hospital Is a Jail." It begins: "At Cook County Jail, an estimated one in three inmates has some form of mental illness. At least 400,000 inmates currently behind bars in the United States suffer from some type of mental illness…"

Next, Kaiser might wanna change the name of its conference rooms to something like, uh, "Mental Health Parity" or "Cultural Competence." 

Finally, Kaiser should spend some of its $15.5 billion in profits to actually fix its notorious problems that deny thousands of Kaiser's own members from getting adequate mental health care.

SEIU: Who's Your Daddy?

SEIU's Dave Kieffer

Tasty hears that SEIU is getting heavy criticism in California for cutting a backroom deal that undermines the efforts of unions and progressive organizations to restore funding for education and social services. And that’s not all. SEIU’s secret deal has even undercuts SEIU’s own members! Here’s what happened:

For many months, SEIU has been an active member of a statewide coalition of unions and community organizations that drafted a “Millionaires Tax Initiative” that would raise state income taxes on millionaires in order to restore funding to California’s schools and social services. The measure, designed for the November ballot, would raise an estimated $4-$6 billion a year.

SEIU helped write the tax measure and even insisted that the new tax revenues go to California’s cash-strapped cities, counties and schools, which employ more than 100,000 of SEIU’s members. As readers may recall, SEIU’s members are getting hammered at the bargaining table across the state. For example, nearly 1,000 members of SEIU Local 1021 in Mendocino County recently took a 12.5% pay cut, according to articles titled “County Seeking Big Concessions from SEIU” and “Supervisors Cut Workers’ Pay by 12.5%.”

The Millionaires Tax offered a perfect solution. So SEIU joined the coalition, which includes the California Federation of Teachers, the Courage Campaign, California Calls (a statewide coalition of community organizations), ACCE and others.

Well… umm… err… that is, until SEIU decided to sell out their labor and community allies!

Last month, SEIU officials suddenly announced they had abandoned the Millionaires Tax and instead were throwing their support behind a competing initiative that’s backed by the Governor and Big Business -- including the Business Roundtable (Bank of America, Safeway, Chevron, AT&T, Sutter Health, Kaiser Permanente, etc), Occidental Petroleum, a private prison corporation, the California Hospital Association (you know, the hospital industry) and other bastions of the 1%.

The Governor's initiative is favored by Big Business because it would raise revenues by hiking the sales tax on all Californians and imposing only a temporary tax hike on the wealthy.

So why did SEIU stab its labor and community allies in the back? Simple. SEIU officials cut a secret deal with Governor Jerry Brown whereby SEIU traded away its support for the Millionaires Tax in exchange for goodies from the Governor. What kind of goodies? According to sources, the Governor committed to support SEIU’s legislation to allow the Purple Palace to unionize thousands of California’s home-based childcare workers. In other words, SEIU is trading away tax revenues for its existing public-sector members so SEIU can grow its membership rolls.

Tasty hears the secret deal was cut when Gov. Brown “met privately” with SEIU President Mary Kay Henry during his recent trip to Washington, DC.

Several days later, SEIU’s Dave Kieffer began publicly attacking SEIU’s former coalition partners, as he did in this article that's entitled: “SEIU Director Tells Jerry Brown’s Tax-Plan Rivals to Step Aside.” In the article, Kieffer urges his former coalition partners to abandon the Millionaires Tax because the Governor is “the Daddy of California.” Kieffer offers other compelling reasons, like this one: if there are two competing measures on the November ballot, "we'll end up with this silly thing where the one with the most votes will get accepted."

Tasty hears that many of SEIU’s members are none too happy. Check out this photo of SEIU members at the recent Occupy Education rally in the state’s capital where workers displayed their support for the Millionaires Tax.

Meanwhile, the Millionaires Tax is polling far ahead of the Governor’s initiative, according to polls like this one. And the supporters of the Millionaires Tax are hanging tough despite the Governor's efforts to twist their arms and SEIU's public attacks. That's why the Governor has been forced to negotiate with the Coalition over a possible compromise initiative. If there is a compromise, Tasty can't wait to see what happens when the Coalition's members find themselves in a room with SEIU officials like Dave Kieffer!