If you're an employer in California and want to choose a provider that will not have to deal with this you might want to consider offering Kaiser to your employees. There's benefits and drawbacks, but one of the big benefits is that they're vertically integrated and the doctors, labs, pharmacies are all part of the same organization. I would think that would help avoid this specific type of situation.
The big drawback is that your employees would need to live near Kaiser facilities. In the Bay Area they are everywhere though and easy to get to. Making use of any doctor or service outside of the Kaiser network is probably not covered.
In that case the pharmacy might not be a problem but the doctors will delay the tests for cancer even for existing cancer patients allowing a relapse to grow unchecked for months to save Kaiser money. That's what happened to a friend of mine. So fucked regardless just to save some money.
That's good. If you had Kaiser, as I state above, the doctors won't send you for the test and the cancer will grow undetected. It doesn't matter if you insist they test you, they still won't. If you're lucky they won't delay long enough to kill you. But you will be worse not having gotten crucial treatment for months because the doctors are part of the racket. On the other hand, your family and friends can be happy that your suffering and death helped Kaiser get richer by saving money on critical tests.
I just haven't had that experience at all. I do use Kaiser. If anything my doctor is very aggressive about considering cancer and getting those screens, way more than I'm comfortable. My experience hasn't been the same as yours.
Tell that to my friend who had already been diagnosed with cancer, was in remission, and had his cancer return undetected for months because Kaiser wouldn't run the tests. He thinks it's ridiculous too.
Kaiser’s system works better than a lot of others, but for me having to drive 40 minutes for a prescription is outrageous when I have 20 other pharmacies in a 15 minute radius.
If the prescriptions are just for fairly routine drugs (diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc), I've found that most of them are cheaper paying the cash price at Walmart than the insured price at Kaiser, or paying the GoodRx price at Safeway.
What I do now is have my Kaiser doctor give me an old-fashioned written prescription on paper, take it to the Kaiser pharmacy that is in the same building as the doctor's office, and ask them what my out of pocket cost will be. While they are figuring that out, I look up my non-Kaiser options in the GoodRx app on my phone. When I get the cost from the Kaiser pharmacy, I can then decide where to actually have it filled.
It was similar before I had Kaiser. The Walmart cash price or the GoodRx price was often less than my copay with Premera or LifeWise if I used insurance.
True. And your employees will not have the choice to see a doctor outside of Kaiser's vertical integration. Even if necessary. Further, since they are all vertically integrated they will necessitate care that is in line with their system.
I've heard good and bad, mostly bad, from Kaiser. But it's hard to tell objectively given the current system and how people interact with it. Personally, I had a not so great experience.
The big drawback is that your employees would need to live near Kaiser facilities. In the Bay Area they are everywhere though and easy to get to. Making use of any doctor or service outside of the Kaiser network is probably not covered.