The difference is when you're on something like BlueCross you have a "network" of hospitals and independent doctors and labs and pharmacies that you can choose

The difference is when you're on something like BlueCross you have a "network" of hospitals and independent doctors and labs and pharmacies that you can choose from. But those are not on all on one IT system and a lot of times they have no way of communicating with each other. With Kaiser it's all vertically integrated under one company that can impose a system-wide IT system.