Last week I put in a request for someone at Kos Health Care to write something about the plight of Justen Deal. No one took me up on it. So while I’m not the best person to be covering this, I’ll give it a shot and request follow up diaries from people who focus on health care.
Justen is a Kaiser Permanente HMO cheerleader. I’ve long regarded him as a stooge and a flak – someone who must be getting paid for constantly spewing Kaiser propaganda. Apparently, though, he’s willing to risk his job and put himself through a world of hurt to bring up a severe problem. Justen put his concerns in an email last Friday, and by Monday Kaiser’s CIO Cliff Dodd had resigned. At the same time Justen was placed on administrative leave while Kaiser HR schmucks comb through policies to try to find a rule he broke. There is no such rule. Kaiser is retaliating against Justen for putting his concerns in writing.
Kaiser has a long history of punishing dissent – but this is the first case with enough publicity to bring it to public attention. Justen only wrote his email after spending months trying to get his concerns heard through proper channels, and he genuinely trying to save the organization he loves working for from the fate of Enron. At the same time he sent his email, he posted a web site that documents all his efforts here. I can’t imagine how hard that was for him to do.
And Justen’s reward for whistleblowing is the usual: executive memos that smear and patronize him have been sent to all Kaiser employees, Kaiser PR weenies are discrediting him everywhere they can (and their smears will be on Google forever), and the MSM is trying to be “fair and balanced” about the whole thing (which always makes a whistleblower regret they said anything).
I can’t underscore enough how important it is for dissent to be protected in the health care system. Low ranking employees need to be able to point out problems in order to expose medical errors, treatment inadequacies, privacy issues, technology mistakes (which get more expensive the longer you wait on recognizing a problem), and financial corruption that gets passed on in the form of increased health care costs.
This diary isn’t enough. I hope more talented health care writers will pick up the slack. I ask you all to keep paying attention to what’s happening to Justen, because his fate will tell you whether truth can be spoken within one of the most powerful HMOs in the U.S.