Kaiser Permanente Quotes

You may also have heard that fiber helps prevent kidney stones. But, in a trial with 99 volunteers, researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, in Walnut Creek, California, found that a high-fiber, low-purine, low animal-protein diet increased the likelihood of getting another kidney stone—by six times!

Between 1995 and 1997 the California-based healthcare network Kaiser Permanente gave more than 17,000 patients a questionnaire to assess the level of trauma in their childhoods. Questions included whether the patients' parents had been mentally or physically abusive or neglectful and whether their parents were divorced or had abused substances. This was called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. After taking the questionnaire, patients were given an ACE score on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the score, the more trauma a person experienced in childhood. The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn't go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema. They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide. Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals surging through our bodies like cortisol and adrenaline are healthy in moderation—you wouldn't be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they've finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who have suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres. In the end, these studies claimed that having an ACE score of 6 or higher takes twenty years off your life expectancy. The average life expectancy for someone with 6 or more ACEs is sixty years old.

Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.

HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.

According to a large study from Kaiser Permanente, for every 0.05 increase above 4.72, patients had an additional 6 percent increased risk of developing diabetes in the next ten years (4.82 = 12 percent increased risk, etc.) Above 5 indicates that vascular damage has already occurred and a patient is at risk for having damage to the kidneys and eyes. Why is high fasting blood sugar a problem? High blood sugar causes vascular problems throughout your whole body, including your brain. Over time, it causes blood vessels to become brittle and vulnerable to breakage. It leads not only to diabetes but also to heart disease, strokes, visual impairment, impaired wound healing, wrinkled skin, and cognitive problems. Diabetes doubles the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Cuando el Estado controla y define los aspectos más importantes de la existencia de las personas —salud, educación, subsidios y otros— la política se convierte en una lucha encarnizada por hacerse del inmenso poder en juego. Pero lo que es peor, los ciudadanos arman facciones que entran en una batalla permanente por los recursos repartidos desde el Gobierno, ahora convertido en la fuente central del bienestar de la población. Como consecuencia, el conflicto pasa a ocupar el lugar de la colaboración voluntaria destruyendo las bases del asociacionismo y la paz social.

As Kaiser Permanente’s guide The Plant-Based Diet: A Healthier Way to Eat puts it: “If you find you cannot do a plant-based diet 100 percent of the time, then aim for 80 percent. Any movement toward more plants and fewer animal products [and processed foods] can improve your health!”3

Then there’s absenteeism. Absenteeism is a purposeful and intentional skipping of work because of conditions people are facing at the job. It’s glorified hooky. It’s a significant financial hit. And it’s rampant in toxic workplaces because people have an oversized need to get out of the office. How expensive is absenteeism? Kaiser Permanente analyzed employee absenteeism and estimated it costs businesses $ 1,685 per employee per year.

Roads became a major industry unto themselves. Hundreds of thousands of men worked building them (including chain-ganged prisoners forced to break rocks for roads).36 More jobs were created in the gas stations, repair shops, restaurants, hotels, and motels that grew up alongside the new highways. Hundreds of other businesses grew fat supplying the raw materials to the road makers—cement, asphalt, gravel, and of course, sand. You may recognize the name of Henry J. Kaiser, or at least his last name, in those of the gargantuan enterprises he founded—Kaiser Steel, Kaiser Aluminum, the Kaiser Permanente health system, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful industrial moguls, but he started out literally at ground level, as a supplier of sand and gravel to the road-paving trade. Born to working-class German immigrants in New York in 1882, Kaiser quit school at thirteen and headed west to seek his fortune.

The lead author from Kaiser Permanente, Jack Hollis, said, “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.

The study appearing in The Lancet confirms that vaccine effectiveness against infection disappears so fast that it is ephemeral. The heavily powered study involved 3,436,957 Kaiser Permanente Southern California customers and compared infections and COVID-19-related hospital admissions of fully vaccinated to unvaccinated people over the age of twelve for up to six months.97