HN values intellectually curious discussion, not ideological cliches. Basic familiarity with site "about" and search features is also strongly encouraged.
Thanks. Yeah I guess I was thinking more about the content/research/advocacy that they themselves produce. The article you link is their news aggregator (kff health news) reposting a Sacramento Bee news article. Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to respond. My impression that KFF doesn’t produce research or advocate for policy that is contrary to Kaiser the HMO’s interest weakly persists, but I suppose that needn’t signal any specific conflicts of interest so much as hint at incentives and business model issues. If I understood KFF’s business model better (are they a think tank?) it might resolve my concern about their alignment with big healthcare interests in general and Kaiser permanente in particular.
Incentives are themselves powerful, whether explicit and overt or covert and/or incidental, so that's a fair gripe.
Note too that it's not the question of whether or not KFF is or isn't biased, toward or away from, Kaiser Permanente or any of the health system's other arms and branches. (Kaiser operates in several states, I'm not sure whether or not those are independent entities, and the physician, hospital, and healthcare insurance functions are also, so far as I'm aware, at least somewhat autonomous.)
Rather it was pursing the extremely weak rhetorical tactic of 1) assuming or implying that the entities are the same and 2) that a bias does exist. I'd not known the answer to either of those questions prior to seeing your original upstream comment, but it took less than a minute to answer both questions. Again, the spirit of HN is for substantive discussion, not casual meme-slinging. Not always attained by any stretch, but the site would be much better for it.
It's not infrequent that I'll begin posting one argument here, research my points (even only casually), and ... substantively change my mind in the process. That's one of the chief values of online discussion IMO. And a good day is one in which I've learned something, so given my admission above, this was two good days, thanks.
Find anyplace that KFF is critical of Kaiser the HMO. I can’t, but would love to be proven wrong.