Kaiser Permanente

Police are investigating whether a Kaiser Permanente transplant surgeon attempted to hasten the death last February of a 26-year-old San Luis Obispo man on life support in order to harvest his organs more quickly. The allegations, if true, would constitute a grave breach of the nation's organ transplant rules, as well as a public relations setback for those promoting organ donation, experts in transplantation said.

Kaiser Permanente has agreed to a first-of-its-kind settlement aimed at ending patient dumping that requires the HMO to establish new discharge rules, provide more training for employees and allow a well-known former U.S. attorney to monitor its progress, officials announced Tuesday.

Kaiser Permanente will be assessed a record fine today for its haphazard investigations of questionable care, physician performance and patient complaints at its California hospitals, according to state HMO regulators. The California Department of Managed Health Care said it will levy a $3-million fine against Kaiser, the largest HMO in the state, with 29 medical centers and more than 6 million members.

Fourteen city-run swimming pools will stay open two additional weeks, thanks to a $121,000 contribution from the healthcare company Kaiser Permanente, officials said Wednesday. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilman Tom LaBonge will appear with Kaiser representatives today to accept the contribution, which will allow the pools to stay open until Sept. 16.

Hospital tax: An article in Friday's California section about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to tax hospitals said, incorrectly, that Kaiser Permanente would lose money under the plan because its hospitals do not treat uninsured patients or accept walk-ins. Kaiser's emergency rooms do both. Kaiser would lose money under the plan because it treats proportionately fewer Medi-Cal patients than other major California hospitals.

A highly unusual battle erupted in a San Diego courtroom Friday, with parents of a severely premature baby seeking to force healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente to move their son to a better-equipped hospital in hopes of saving his life. In the morning, Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright gave Kaiser's San Diego hospital 24 hours to transfer 7-week-old Andrew Balaka-Long to a higher-level neonatal intensive care unit outside the Kaiser network.

A severely premature San Diego baby at the center of an unusual legal dispute between his parents and Kaiser Permanente was moved Wednesday to the neonatal intensive care unit at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego. Andrew Balaka-Long's parents went to court last week trying to force Kaiser's San Diego hospital to transfer their son to a better-equipped facility in hopes of saving his life. Andrew was born 16 weeks premature Aug. 2 and weighed 660 grams, or about 1 1/2 pounds.

Late one April night, the first of Sarah Valenzuela's twins arrived with little trouble, but the second stayed put. Though the baby was not in distress, Kaiser Permanente perinatologist Hamid Safari attached a vacuum extractor to the boy's head to draw him out. Again and again he tugged, but still the baby would not come. He vigorously shook the vacuum, up and down, side to side, according to government documents and hospital incident reports.

In mid-2004, more than 1,500 Kaiser Permanente patients awaiting kidney transplants in Northern California got form letters that forced them to change the course of their treatment. Kaiser would no longer pay for transplants at outside hospitals, even established programs with thousands of successes. Instead, adult patients would be transferred to a new transplant center run by Kaiser itself -- the first ever opened by the nation's largest HMO.

Twenty-five Kaiser Permanente patients in Northern California were denied the chance for new kidneys that were nearly perfectly matched to them last year during the troubled start-up of the giant HMO's kidney transplant program in San Francisco, a Times investigation has found. The patients missed this opportunity because they were in effect stranded between two transplant programs.