"Michel Boucher" > wrote
>
> Dan has been touting the benefits of Kaiser so much you'd think he was
> on the payroll ;-)

As it turns out, the NC problem was not my imagination. The quote below is
from Wiki:


"Regional evolution
By 1990, Kaiser Permanente provided coverage for about a third of the
population of the cities of San Francisco and Oakland; total Northern
California membership was over 2.4 million.[32]

Elsewhere, Kaiser Permanente did not do as well, and its geographic
footprint changed significantly in the 1990s. The organization spun off or
closed outposts in Texas, North Carolina, and the Northeast. In 1998, Kaiser
Permanente sold its Texas operations, where reported problems had become so
severe that the organization directed its lawyers to attempt to block the
release of a Texas Department of Insurance report. This prompted the state
attorney general to threaten to revoke the organization's license. In North
Carolina, the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO issued a 1996
report critical of the quality of the care the organization
provided[citation needed]. Kaiser Permanente closed health plans in
Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina four years later. The
organization also sold its unprofitable Northeast division in 2000.

In 1995, Kaiser Permanente celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a public
health plan. Two years later, national membership reached nine million. In
1997, the organization established an agreement with the AFL-CIO to explore
a new approach to the relationship between management and labor, known as
the Labor Management Partnership."