I am interested in the answer to your question as well. I have heard from senior residents at top programs that a job at Kaiser LA is very desirable based on salary and location. And if you look at their faculty, they seem to take a large share from their own program. Thus, if you knew you wanted to go into private practice in LA, it would certainly seem like a good choice.
When I interviewed there, I found it more pleasant than I had expected. The residents were very nice and seemed bright. They claimed to be happy with the education and the workload was very manageable. It was definitely not an academics focused program but they have a huge patient database that you can use for research projects. They have a high patient numbers and see enough of each disease site, including peds...probably better than a large number of programs.
The most obvious "drawback" was the way the resident teaching worked. It wasn't "site specific" so you would follow various attendings and see multiple disease sites during the week. To me it seemed a little off-putting but residents said it was good because you didn't forget how to treat any site, as is purported to be the case when you have one site early on in your residency that you may not have again.
This set-up didn't seem to be enough to deter me from ranking the program, and if i had ended up there I would have been fine with it (it actually would have been high on my list if i didn't think i wanted to work in academics for my career). Sooo, i too would love some insight as to why this program doesn't seem to get a lot of respect.
