Kaiser Permanente, California's largest health maintenance organization, restricted patients' access to Northern California doctors. This while touting their easy availability with the campaign slogan, "you're in the hands of doctors" according to a newly released study.

"I can never get a hold of my own doctor -- you have to go through so much red tape," said American Canyon resident Barbara Conrad. "My medications get loused up, you have to go in there and yell all the time -- it's terrible."

Conrad, 55, is disabled by fibromyalgia, a common rheumatic syndrome which causes acute pain in tissues, muscles and tendons. She said her husband had a severe hernia operation on Friday -- on Saturday, he was incapacitated after being sent home immediately after surgery.

"He's hurting -- he can't get out of bed," Conrad said. "They're trying to save themselves money."

Conrad's experiences are supported by the study conducted by the Los Angeles Times. The paper's staff reviewed Kaiser documents, including e-mails and notes of private meetings, and found Kaiser encouraged its doctors in Northern California to make themselves as unavailable as possible to their patients in an effort to lower patient demand and costs.

Dr. Robert Pearl, chief executive of Kaiser, said at a private meeting that "we chose not to provide our patients with what they desired," the Times reported. Later, Pearl recommended a change in the way the company conducted business to his physician group's board of directors, saying the policy was making patients and doctors very unhappy and wasn't saving money.

Pearl said cost-saving measures failed because most patients persisted in efforts to get an appointment, according to the minutes of a July 2000 meeting.

Other internal documents show that Kaiser encouraged the use of non-doctors and this worried other employees who said it went against their 1998 "in the hands of doctors" campaign.

Kaiser official Cecilia Runkle complained in an e-mail that "the tag line may promise more than we can deliver."

The internal documents were obtained from a nurses' labor union and a consumer group that sued the HMO for false advertising. The lawsuit is pending.

There was no comment Saturday from Kaiser-Permanente. Spokeswoman Laura Marshall, at the HMO's headquarters in Oakland, did not immediately respond to telephone messages and pages from the Times-Herald. Officials at Kaiser Vallejo hospital likewise did not return calls.

The Times said the company denied it misled anyone and cited favorable results from an independent survey of its 3 million Northern California members. When it came to patients' access to primary care physicians, Kaiser was rated above average in the late 1990s compared to other HMOs. Kaiser's Southern California services were rated about average.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

E-mail Bryan K. Pruitt at BPruitt@thnewsnet.com, or phone 553-6834.