The nation’s largest healthcare provider wants its Covid unvaccinated doctors back

American Thinker ^ | 05/25/2024 | Andrea Widburg

[SeekAndFind]

Kaiser Permanente is America’s oldest HMO and largest healthcare provider. It’s a superb institution but is suffering the consequences of embracing the leftist COVID narrative. As a sign of its retreat from its COVID dead-end, it’s now trying to get its unvaccinated doctors back into the fold.

For 33 years, I’ve been a completely satisfied Kaiser patient.* I’ve never received anything but good care from the people who work there, whether doctors, nurses, physical therapists, receptionists, pharmacists, or anyone else. I also think it’s a fantastic model of how medical care can be done well and affordably.

Kaiser is named after the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who founded it in 1945 after over a decade of providing low-cost healthcare to workers and their families. What made Kaiser’s treatment centers different was that they didn’t focus on treating only existing illnesses and injuries. Instead, the minds behind it figured out that a healthy workforce was a productive workforce, so Kaiser facilities emphasized preventative medicine.

From that single corporate beginning, Kaiser has grown into America’s largest Health Maintenance Organization, with offices across the West, Hawaii, and the Southeast.

[SNIP]

during COVID, Kaiser was at the front of the line—proudly so—for vaccination. That meant that when state and local governments demanded vaccinations for physicians, and when Joe Biden issued an executive order mandating vaccinations for healthcare workers in facilities receiving federal reimbursement (that means all of them), Kaiser meekly went along with the mandates.

Kaiser did so despite being the largest healthcare provider in America, which means that it has an enormous voice in the medical field. That’s why, in 2021, Kaiser fired all physicians who refused vaccinations and didn’t qualify for exemptions.

Now, though, those mandates are gone, and Kaiser is facing a reckoning in the form of a physician shortage.

[TBall]

“While COVID-19 vaccination will not be a requirement of working at Kaiser Permanente, employees will be required to annually verify their COVID-19 vaccination status.” Yeah, I bet is those that left won’t be cheap hires.