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In a response to questions for this story, Kaiser Permanente released a statement that read, in part: The credit rating agency Fitch Ratings said last year that Kaiser-issued bonds were a good buy for investors because of “Kaiser’s long track record of extremely consistent profitability.” In 2020, Kaiser reported a total operating revenue of nearly $89 billion-about $60 billion of which was generated in California, according to Fitch’s most recent report. Kaiser’s resources, indeed, appear to be ample enough. “The only explanation that Kaiser offered us was to cite a State of California study indicating an 11% shortage of psychologists and other (non-psychiatrist) mental health providers, but the study actually referred to a projected shortage a decade from now.” “We believe that Kaiser could hire more therapists readily if it admitted that this problem exists and chose to commit some of its ample resources to fixing it,” the APA said in its letter. The APA claimed Kaiser could solve this problem if it wanted to by simply hiring more therapists, but that Kaiser as an institution appeared to be in denial that it had a serious problem. (Disclosure: The NUHW is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.) This difficulty, many of them said, applied to patients with both severe and moderate mental illness and substance use disorders. “Making people with mental illness, especially depression, jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops to get care is like making somebody with a broken leg jump through physical hoops to get care,” said Greta Christina, a writer and Kaiser mental health patient of about 20 years.Ī poll of more than 2,000 Kaiser therapists taken late last year by their labor union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), found 80% complaining that understaffing prevented them from providing patients with appropriate and timely care. At some of the most understaffed Kaiser clinics in the state, that waiting period between sessions can be two to four months-leaving some patients frustrated with their struggle to access care.
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“They’ve got such clout in the market, they could actually change things,” he said.Īccording to the APA and other observers, Kaiser continues to ignore calls to match the level of its treatment of mental illnesses and substance use disorders with that of its care for physical health conditions-an equation known as mental health parity.Īccording to Kaiser patients, therapists, state reports, and the APA, the waiting period between appointments at Kaiser can range anywhere from four to six weeks. New policies adopted by Kaiser have a way of quickly migrating to other medical systems, whereas programs that Kaiser rejects may not have an easy time gaining acceptance elsewhere.īen Goldstone, a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) at Kaiser in Berkeley, compared Kaiser’s influence over California’s health care industry to that of Facebook’s authority in the tech sphere and Amazon’s hold on e-commerce. As both California’s largest health insurer and its largest operator of hospitals, Kaiser is of pivotal importance in determining the success of long-standing national and state-level mandates intended to make mental health care as readily available to patients as is care for their physical ailments.