It's like the 1960s all over again

I attended today’s in-person meeting with CEO Rich Isaacs and Interim KFH President Tom Hanenburg at our Roseville medical center. Our leaders acknowledged the many ways in which our people have performed admirably during the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasized the importance of launching the recovery and reactivation programs that will help us maintain our position in a world of job losses, reduced revenues, and frequent reminders of the deeply entrenched inequities in our society such as the death of George Floyd on May 25th. Dr. Isaacs pointed out that headlines of a manned space launch and riots reminded him of the 1960s, the decade into which I was born. Christopher Booker described that era as “a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm.” To my parents’ generation, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race riots, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, and the Vietnam War played out as a protracted nightmare, full of angst, and short on hope. Some of us may feel this way about our current state of affairs. I’m here to remind you that we survived the 60s and will also emerge from our current predicament. According to Dr. Isaacs, the trajectory of our recovery will look more like the subtly sloped end of the Nike swoosh than a V-shape, but the direction will be upward. As I looked around the room at our colleagues who are helping to lead the charge and listened to the meaningful exchange between them and our regional leaders, I was filled with hope. Kaiser Permanente and TPMG will be a leader in this recovery because of our integration, prepaid model of care, and the ability of our people to collaboratively adapt to change. Of that, this child of the 60s is certain.