Maybe they have improved but long ago I had them in Washington DC and my parents used them in Denver, CO and although they seemed fine to me for through my twenties when I didn't need anything but annual gyn appointments, as soon as I started having health issues they turned out to be awful. I had a stone in a salivary gland and the abysmally poor doctor looked down my throat and at the outside of my throat, then told me if I kept swelling up when I ate to come back in a month. I went to a private doctor that I had to pay for myself and the doctor looked under my tongue, couldn't get it out easily, and had me come back for 'surgery day' the next day which turned out to be just spritz with numbing spray and make a micro cut, and he showed it to me (like a tiny grain of sand).
And when I had a flake of skin that kept showing up on my nose, by the time I saw the Kaiser doctor it wasn't there but he said when it developed the flake again to come in right away and he'd freeze it off. But when I tried to do that a few weeks later, the nurses refused to let me be seen unless I made an appointment far in the future again.
Then when I got Lyme disease Kaiser went through telling me I had hives, then they told me I had ring worm, then the after hours doctor (who seemed way above the standard of the daytime doctors) said it appeared to be Lyme disease. But then the Kaiser infectious disease specialist said it was 'impossible' to get Lyme in the winter (I later found stats on the CDC site that indicated that in my state 10% of cases occurred in winter) and sent me for a pregnancy test. In a follow up appointment he said he consulted Dr So&So who was an expert in the field and he'd agreed I did not have Lyme. But then there was a public seminar a few suburbs north of me and I went to it, and there was an opportunity for the audience to ask questions, and so I stood up and explained my experience and the info of my doctor, and when I mentioned the name of the 'expert in the field' audience members started laughing and booing. Turns out the 'expert' was notorious for denying treatment to people with Lyme Disease.
Then when I suddenly lost my swallow reflex for food (probably due to the Lyme Disease but I didn't connect the dots at first) and tried to get an appointment with the Kaiser throat specialist group, I was told there were no appointments available for three months!
Luckily by then it was the annual opportunity at work to change our health insurance and I switched to a PPO that allowed me to see specialists without filtering through a PCP and had an excellent network of doctors (tho the insurance did cost quite a bit more than Kaiser Permanente).
My parents also thought Kaiser was okay until my dad got cancer and Kaiser said there were no appointments for treatment for four months! So they had to go the private care route to get timely treatment.
I read in the news a few years later that someone in the state of Washington successfully sued Kaiser for the cost of having to get private care when Kaiser didn't have appointments available in a reasonable timeframe.
Also a girl at work's twin sister in her early twenties had her leg broken in two places in a soccer game and she had Kaiser and they made her wait at home for a whole freaking week until there was an available surgery appointment. She said the surgeon was shocked and said if they had only just paged him he would have come in right way to do the surgery.
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