Kaisers' Managed Healthcare - California levies $8 million in fines in a 1 year period

Kaiser Permanente is being slammed with a whopping $3 million fine by the state of California's Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC).

This is a record setting fine. But its not their first in the past year. The recent claim, by California's Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC), is that Kaiser does'nt investigate patient complaints very well. Some of the problems are related to questionable physician performance. This all came to light when Kaiser's kidney transplant program was forced to close. State regulators reviewed the kidney transplant programs' failure and reportedly found that Kaiser was doing a grossly inadequate job of monitoring allegations related to poor patient care.

In the review process, state inspectors highlighted their so called "peer review" process. They found that the standards for the review process was not standard at all. In fact, some hospitals referred the problem cases to peer reviews over and over again. To the tune of 20 times. This $3 million fine marks the second fine for Kaiser in a one year period. Last August, DMHC fined Kaiser $2 million for its role in the transplant programs' collapse. The DMHC also mandated that they donate $3 million dollars to promote organ donation. So in total, fines add up to 8 million dollars due to negligent conduct or poor practices. I guess the big question here is not what seems to be huge fines. Rather, what did they save in the process? Not good.