A Medical Device Daily

A class action complaint has been filed in San Francisco Superior Court against Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, California), related to the closure of its kidney transplant program in San Francisco last month.

The lawsuit was filed by Irvine attorneys Eisenberg & Gray, which also is lead counsel in the transplant litigation against theUniversity of California at Irvine Medical Center (Medical Device Daily, Feb. 17, 2006).

“It appears that Kaiser was more concerned about the bottom line than the health of their member patients,” said Irvine attorney Larry Eisenberg. “They forced their Northern California kidney transplant patients to leave the University of California at San Francisco and University of California at Davis and become patients at Kaiser's in-house transplant facility in San Francisco. Kaiser did not want to pay for ongoing kidney transplant medical care for approximately 2,000 Northern California patients, so they attempted to open their own facility but totally failed in the process.”

Eisenberg concluded: “This is an outrageous example of gross mismanagement at the highest level. Kaiser interrupted ongoing transplant medical care and rejected donor kidneys, which caused patient deaths and severely compromised the health of their members.”

The lawsuit alleges negligence, fraud and misrepresentation due to Kaiser's inability to properly administrate the San Francisco Kidney Transplant Program.

Eisenberg charged that Kaiser patients “did not receive proper medical care, and kidney transplants were delayed. There was a complete lack of oversight in the operation and administration of the Kaiser program and the patients and their families paid the price.”