Kaiser Foundation Health Plan

One of the state's largest employers, healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, said it would eliminate more than 1,800 positions as it struggles with drooping membership, uncertain healthcare reform and shriveling Medicare reimbursement rates. Job reductions will occur within the next few months, the Oakland-based nonprofit said Tuesday. Many of the purged positions -- just under 2% of Kaiser employees -- are temporary, on-call or short-hour. Most Kaiser medical centers in California will be affected.

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. said Tuesday that it was working with state regulators to develop standards to protect its members from unfair cancellations of health insurance, a move that the state's largest HMO hopes could lead to industrywide reforms. Kaiser's move comes as it was being fined $100,000 by state regulators for dropping a policyholder it accused of concealing his epilepsy when he applied for coverage, even though the condition had never been diagnosed by a physician.

Tenet Healthcare Corp. is suing Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc., claiming that Kaiser failed to pay about $16 million for services provided to Kaiser patients at Tenet-run hospitals. The lawsuit was filed in Orange County Superior Court. In addition to Tenet, three dozen hospitals are also named as plaintiffs in the case. Kaiser spokesman James Anderson said Kaiser disputed the allegations, but he declined to elaborate.

State regulators for the first time have ordered a health plan to reinstate the insurance coverage of a patient whose policy was ruled to have been illegally canceled. In an order posted Wednesday, the Department of Managed Health Care ruled that Kaiser Foundation Health Plan illegally canceled coverage for a Northern California woman in urgent need of medical attention for large kidney stones.

An arbitration panel has faulted Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. for contributing to the overdose death of a patient in 2005 and awarded his family $319,000. The panel found the Kaiser hospital in Harbor City "fell beneath the standard of care" and that the insulin overdose was "a substantial contributing factor" in the death of 73-year-old Peter Lakos, the panel wrote in a decision dated Jan. 30. Lakos, a Type 2 diabetic, was injected with 10 times the normal dose of insulin and went into respiratory arrest in 2005.

Ever since anyone around here can remember, Sarah Nome has been the quintessential community gadfly, jousting with public officials in Marin County over issues big and small. Now, at 82, she's in a quixotic fight over her hospital bed. For more than a year, Nome has pugnaciously refused to budge from her fifth-floor room at Kaiser Permanente's San Rafael Medical Center. In the process, she has racked up $1.3 million in bills.

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc., the nonprofit company that operates Kaiser Permanente, said Friday that it lost $525 million in the fourth quarter of 2002 on revenue of $5.8 billion. The Oakland-based integrated health-care system, which includes the health maintenance organization and Kaiser hospitals, blamed the loss on costs associated with a change in how it maintains medical records. In the same period in 2001, Kaiser reported net income of $187 million on $5 billion in revenue.

Six years ago, the California Supreme Court ruled that Kaiser Foundation Health Plan's system for arbitrating legal disputes was poorly regulated, prone to long delays and generally stacked against the best interests of Kaiser's members.

The state Department of Corporations said it has closed its investigation of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan's policies regarding the anti-impotence pill Viagra after finding that the HMO earlier this year "may have encouraged" its doctors not to prescribe the drug because of cost considerations. In April, Kaiser, the nation's largest nonprofit HMO, announced that, with rare exceptions, it would not cover the cost of the expensive treatment for sexual dysfunction.

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan in Texas routinely refused to pay for emergency room care, even in some cases where Kaiser nurses advised patients to seek emergency treatment, according to a controversial state report released by Texas regulators. The report, provided to The Times on Wednesday, also said Kaiser failed to act on complaints against its physicians, and it faulted the company for "an unacceptable disregard for quality-of-care issues."