Guess I am naive. I was born at KP Oakland and enjoyed being a member of KP when I was in CA. Decent medical care, often preventative.
In fact, missed the ability to get an HMO when I came to Texas. For the price options available to me, ended up with a high deductible plan. The equivalent in TX for KP was at least twice the cost.
I started hearing about KP when I was very young, relatives who had to use KP usually did not have good experiences. I had KP briefly (maybe in Washington State so prior to 1999) and was not impressed. Recently I worked in disability claims, and KP was hard to get medical records from. You had to do it their way, they had no flexibility and an enormous number of hurdles. Patients could not ask for their own records to be sent, it had to come from an insurance provider, and then it was expensive and slow. KP is essentially a monopoly in many areas, and they act like it.
@HippieChick58 Interesting and thank you for explaining. I agree that your experience isn't great.
My own experience is that I asked for and got my daughter's medical records when asked. This was done quickly and at no cost. This was just a few years ago (as part of my move to TX), so perhaps better now?
@RPardoe I worked disability claims until two months ago, so my dealings with KP were pretty recent. I have to admit that Electronic Health Records are not making things easier. It has increased the number of pages, but cut down on the amount of usable information. Yeah, medical care in the US is not stellar.
@HippieChick58 Thank you. And I agree completely with your final sentence - medical care in the US is not stellar.