Posts Tagged ‘Sidney Garfield’

Opening a Prepaid Health Plan to the Public 65 Years Ago this Month, Kaiser Permanente Begins Its Post-World War II Life

posted on July 22, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

This Oakland Tribune clipping is one of many news stories when Kaiser Permanente began opening its doors to the public.

Sixty-five years ago this month the curtain was about to fall on the dreadful years of World War II, and Dr. Sidney R. Garfield and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser were raising the curtain on their plans to expand their prepaid Permanente Foundation Health Plan—later renamed Kaiser Foundation—beyond Kaiser’s employees to the general public.

So it was, in July 1945, that they announced that the “first large extension of the family health plan” beyond Kaiser workers would be in Vallejo, California, about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco.

The idea of going to Vallejo with a Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospital resulted from a grassroots invitation from citizens there—a sort of populist request for prepaid medical care. That should come as no surprise. The new medical care program—nicknamed “a Mayo Clinic for the common man” by one writer of the era—had been a hit with workers in the wartime Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond and was getting nationwide media notice.

“I don’t see why this can’t be done everywhere, for everyone,” said one shipyard worker. “This should be for everybody,” added another. “We must organize and demand this not only for us workers but for all their families. It should be for everybody in America.”

Against that backdrop, Kaiser Permanente was invited to town by a tenants’ council of the Vallejo Housing Authority to provide care for residents of eight large wartime public housing dormitories. A doctor was assigned to each dormitory and a clinic was set up within an existing public health service infirmary.

Meanwhile, with the cooperation of local physicians, a citizen’s committee had unraveled wartime bureaucracies to get the government-sponsored Vallejo Community Hospital opened in 1944. It was needed because the Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo and the nearby Benicia Arsenal ordnance facility had drawn thousands of wartime civilian workers. The city’s few doctors had been swamped by a flood of new patients.

However, with the war ending, the government was no longer willing to support a community hospital. The military-style facility—long, low buildings spread over 30 acres—closed after the war ended in August, leaving thousands of civilian families without medical care.

Before long, the not-for-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan needed a full service hospital in Vallejo. So, on April 1, 1947, Kaiser Permanente re-opened the 250-bed Vallejo Community Hospital as its own, having first leased it as surplus property from the Federal Works Agency. Later, it bought the hospital at the site where Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center remains to this day.

“This…marks the beginning of efforts now underway by the Kaiser organization to offer Permanente Foundation facilities to all groups interested in complete prepaid medicine,” the July 1945 announcement read. The existing facilities were those on the Home Front of World War II serving Henry Kaiser’s shipyards and steel mill. They were in Richmond, Oakland, and Fontana in California and in Vancouver in Washington state.

Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center started with rebuilding of the burned out shell of a former hospital, seen here in 1942 with Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, at right, and Ned Dobbs, liaison between physicians and the architects.

A few days later, Clyde F. Diddle, administrator of the Oakland Medical Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Oakland hospital was being opened to the public under four principles: prepayment, group medical practice, adequate facilities, and “a new medical economy.”

“This ‘new economy,’ strongly opposed in part by some factions favoring the traditional family physician-patient relationship, follows the old Chinese practice of paying the physician while you are well,” the Chronicle said.

Added Diddle, “We offer medical service from nasal spray to surgery—and all under one roof. The important thing is that there are no barriers to early treatment. …Patients are encouraged to come in early…”

The Chronicle article also reported that Henry Kaiser was preparing a proposal for Congress to establish a nationwide system of voluntary prepaid medical care.  This would be the first of many continuing efforts to support Sidney Garfield’s dream of health care for all Americans that have continued to the present day.

These historic events are honored today by the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, which includes historic sites of the wartime medical care program. Notes National Park Service interpretative materials: “Today, prepaid medical care is central to American culture—it is a legacy of the WWII Home Front.”

Forecasts in 1945 projected eventually serving about 25,000 people in Vallejo. Today, the Vallejo Medical Centers serves about 10 times that number in California’s Napa and Solano counties alone. The entire Kaiser Permanente multi-state program serves 8.6 million members.

The “official” date for Kaiser Permanente’s opening to the public became Oct. 1, 1945, but the work got under way in earnest starting in July.

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Kaiser Permanente’s LA Harbor Area Blossoms after Humble 1950 Start

posted on June 21, 2010

By Ginny McPartland 

Kaiser Permanente’s post-World War II public health plan was but an embryo in 1950 when famed labor leader Harry Bridges asked Dr. Sidney Garfield to provide medical care for West Coast longshoremen. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had just adopted a health and welfare plan for its members, and Permanente’s prepaid health coverage fit Bridges’ vision. 

The health plan, then called Permanente, already had services in the San Francisco Bay area, so covering the six or seven thousand Northern California dock workers was no problem. But Permanente’s only presence in Southern California was at the Fontana Steel Plant, 70 miles inland from the Los Angeles harbor area where the roughly 3,000 longshoremen lived. 

Kennebec medical clinic in the 1950s

Garfield didn’t have to ponder Bridges’ offer for long. The struggling health plan needed members – desperately. After saying “yes!” to Bridges, Garfield flew into action. He hired a physician to run the longshoremen clinic, found a suitable building in the Port of Los Angeles town of San Pedro and opened for business in about two weeks. 

Today, Kaiser Permanente’s South Bay service area, boasts about 190,000 members, a 255-bed medical center, and medical offices in Long Beach, Torrance, Harbor City, Lomita, Carson, and Gardena. The KP South Bay community is celebrating its 60 years of history on Wednesday, June 23, in Harbor City. 

It’s been a rough ride 

The Harbor area health plan’s six decades of existence can be characterized as a roller coaster ride with its ups, downs, and unexpected turns. The years have brought growth, at times unmanageable, stopgap solutions to facility needs, the San Pedro murder of a popular doctor, and a fire that disrupted operations for a year – not all roses and sunshine. 

The early medical group, led by Ira “Buck” Wallin, MD, worked out of a small clinic in San Pedro and had to fight for legitimacy and for staff privileges at any of the area hospitals. They were blackballed by the local medical community for practicing what was called “socialized medicine” when the “Red Scare” was the order of the day. This contention was typical of the anti-group-practice atmosphere anywhere Permanente Medicine established itself. 

In the beginning, and for many years, the doctors made house calls and took turns sleeping overnight in a blood draw room in the clinic. They were at the beck and call of the longshoremen and their families. Over the first five years, the ILWU became steadily more impatient with the health plan for delaying construction of a sorely needed Harbor area medical center.

Early Parkview clinic in Harbor City

 Meanwhile, the group had expanded to Long Beach – first to an old house and then to the old posh Kennebec Hotel across from the Pike, a popular amusement park in Long Beach. The health plan also opened a Los Angeles clinic and then a hospital on Sunset Boulevard. From 1953 when the Sunset Hospital opened until the Harbor City hospital was built in 1957, patients were shuttled to Los Angeles for hospital care.

After a tussle with the ILWU that threatened the loss of the group, Sidney Garfield and Buck Wallin got the funding to build the Harbor City medical center. The first medical office building, called Parkview, was opened adjacent to the hospital in 1958.

South Bay no stranger to innovation

The South Bay/Harbor City movers and shakers contributed more than their share of innovative ideas over the years. Some examples:

  • In 1964, Harry Shragg, who later became area medical director, was the first in Southern California Kaiser Permanente to perform outpatient surgery, a practice that would become prevalent for its economy and medical soundness.
  • In 1964-65, Buck Wallin and Chief of Medicine William Fawell pursued the idea of discharging patients sooner and providing follow-up medical care in their homes. When Medicare came along in 1965, suddenly (home health care) became one of the ‘in’ things to do.
  • In the early 1970s, Harry Shragg, Internist Jay Belsky, and Medical Group Administrator Ed Bunting worked together to develop a new exam room layout that would leave more room for the patient and the examination table. “It was such a big success that it was adopted and became standard for all of Southern California, Bunting said.

The good, the bad and the ugly

  • In 1967, Dr. Shragg saw the opportunity to help disadvantaged Harbor City people through a local program funded by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Kaiser Permanente used its community service funds to provide medical care for 100 participant families.
  • In 1960, Leon Quattlebaum, a well-liked and respected 36-year-old Harbor City OB-GYN, was killed in San Pedro by a local tough who, unprovoked, punched “Q” in the jaw, knocking him to the cement floor and fracturing his skull. The prosecutor at the murder trial said the only reason for the killing was the murderer’s “malignancy of heart.”
  • In November of 1973, a night fire of unknown origin collapsed the three-story Parkview engineering tower and threatened to destroy Harbor City’s medical records and appointments data. The medical offices and appointment center were up and running again in about a week, said MGA Ed Bunting. But it took about a year to rebuild the burned out section at the center and make the complex whole again.

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50 Years Ago: The Birth of Computers in KP Medicine

posted on May 13, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

Dr. Sidney Garfield is seen in 1970 in an experimental health education center when he and his colleagues worked on his idea of "a building for health" built around the idea of central compuyting and health education.

Kaiser Permanente today is arguably the most advanced non-governmental health care organization in the country, and perhaps in the world, in the use of computers in medicine. A key historic reason for that leadership is its pioneering role. So this week we recognize the moment this work all began exactly 50 years ago.

The big lesson is that innovation did not occur through magic. It took vision, openness to new ideas, and dedicated work by thousands of people over the ensuing decades.

The result is that, at a time when electronic medical record systems have barely scratched the surface of American medicine, they are pervasive throughout Kaiser Permanente. All 8.6 million members have their own electronic medical records, which are also available throughout the organization’s 36 hospitals.

What’s more, the system’s Web-based member portal enables members to view most portions of their own medical record on line, send secure messages to their doctors, order prescriptions, make appointments, view lab results, and much more.

The critical moment when the futuristic vision of computer-enabled medical care came together with an organizational willingness to embrace new ideas came in May 1960. At a four-day leadership meeting, Sidney R. Garfield, our founding physician, was giving a report about hospital designs. Then, he shifted gears and announced, “I would like to use my remaining minutes on a more important, new concept. I want to throw this idea on the table for your consideration. Please accept it in the spirit it is given. It is a controversial idea, but please keep an open mind.”

It was a whopper.

“Let us conceive a building for health—designed, streamlined and geared to serve our healthy members. This health institute could conceivably function in this fashion. Each new health plan member would automatically and periodically be called in for service. On his first visit, a history would be taken and fed in a computer.

“A duplicate of this history would be sent to his service area. On each periodic visit or service visit, further data would be taken . . . and fed into this record. This would not only develop records never before available, but might do so at a great savings in time of physicians.”

The late Dr. John G. Smillie, who was at the meeting, commented on the discussion at the time that physicians who were there felt Garfield’s proposal “had exciting merit,” adding they said “it should be studied from many angles, and designed and redesigned… (and) should be made flexible to meet new developments…”

Dr. Morris F. Collen is seen in a photo shot for the cover of Modern Medicine magazine in 1968.

Over the next decade, the 1960s, research and testing headed by Garfield’s colleague, Morris F. Collen, MD, propelled Kaiser Permanente into a leadership role in the emerging field of medical informatics.

Within that decade, more than one million patients had early versions of electronic medical records and became more involved in their own care because of the new levels of knowledge available to them and their doctors.

“It was the first transformational aspect of looking at how the system of caring for patients could change,” recalls Dr. Marion J. Ball, author of “Consumer Informatics: Applications and Strategies in Cyber Health Care” and adjunct professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.

Dr. Collen recognized in the early years of his work that the computer would be an incredibly important tool in modern medicine, declaring in 1966: “The computer will probably have the greatest impact on medical science since the invention of the microscope.”

Dr. Cecil C. Cutting, the first executive director of The Permanente Medical Group, challenged all physicians in 1965 to embrace the future in a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“. . . The great challenge,” he said, “will be the willingness of traditional medicine to accept these new concepts and reorganize to provide these services. The future . . . in medicine may well rest on the open-mindedness of the doc¬tors of the country to anticipate inevitable trends and lead the way. We earnestly hope they will.”

That Kaiser Permanente was changing from a pioneer to a continuing leader in health information technology (IT) was well established by 1968, when its annual report stated: “The computer cannot replace the physician, but it can keep essential data moving smoothly from laboratory to nurses’ station, from X-ray department to the patient’s chart, and from all areas of the medical center to the physician himself.”

This early embrace of health IT – and persistent work in the half century since – explains why, as I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, 12 of the first 13 American hospitals to be rewarded by HIMSS, the leading health IT association, for having the highest level of e-connectivity were Kaiser Permanente hospitals. This year, 24 Kaiser Permanente hospitals have achieved that status, with more on the way. Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of America’s hospitals are at this stage.

What was said of Dr. Garfield two decades ago is just as true today: “Sidney Garfield…had a way of always operating on the cutting edge of the future.”

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Harry Bridges and Sidney Garfield: Synergistic Collaboration

posted on March 31, 2010

Harry Bridges at ILWU meeting 1960

By Ginny McPartland
During the Cold War, the average American scorned any ideas that even hinted at socialism. Going against mainstream politics in the 1950s was fraught with danger.

Henry J. Kaiser and Sidney Garfield, MD, took their licks from the conservative medical establishment for their nontraditional ideas of health care. They were called “socialist” even though both were adamantly opposed to “socialized medicine.”  

Their contemporary– and sometimes collaborator — militant labor leader Harry Bridges was accused of being a communist, which he was not, as he fought hard and dangerously for bargaining power for dock workers.  

Marking the 20th anniversary of Bridges’s death this month brings to mind the groundbreaking 20th century achievements of these working class heroes. Despite the opposition, they didn’t back down.  

For Harry Bridges, elevating the worker to the bargaining table was a lifetime passion. His heart was with the “working stiff” who was considered almost like property of the employer before unions. “The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.” 

Born in Australia in 1900, Bridges was inspired by Jack London’s books to go to sea. He jumped ship on his first job because he disagreed with the skipper on the treatment of the seaman. He landed in San Francisco and soon began to organize the waterfront workers.  

His work culminated in 1934 in the San Francisco dock workers strike that resulted in the death of two men, casualties of police bullets. Union members refused to work until they could negotiate higher wages and a method of getting work on the docks without having to pay a kickback. The strikers won and Harry Bridges was set for 40 years as the president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) starting in 1937.  

“A Working Class Hero Is Something to Be” — John Lennon

By 1950, the ILWU had become a strong advocate for its members, and its leadership worked to spread unionism to other industries. The ILWU pioneered health and welfare benefits for its members. 

Enter Sidney Garfield: 
After the War when the Richmond shipyards closed, Kaiser and the Permanente doctors were ready, willing and able to take care of people. Both men had track records of providing affordable care to the working man. The health plan had been opened up to the public in 1945 but the enrollment was small. 

Enter Harry Bridges: 
It was a marriage with great potential. Bridges needed a health plan for his members and Henry Kaiser needed health plan members. Instant symbiosis.
  

In many ways, the goals of the two organizations converged. Bridges wanted all of his workers to have a health assessment and screenings to prevent disease. Kaiser Permanente’s Garfield saw how to accomplish the “multiphasic” examinations for all twenty thousand workers and later set up a way of collecting the results, at first on paper, and then in KP’s pioneering computerization of medical records. In effect, the ILWU members were guinea pigs for what has grown and expanded into KP’s electronic medical records prowess.  

Young Harry Bridges aboard ship about 1920.

Along the way, Bridges helped Kaiser Permanente by writing editorials in the ILWU newsletter supporting the health plan physicians. In 1953 Bridges assailed the San Pedro Community Hospital in Los Angeles for refusing privileges to KP doctors. In 1954, he criticized the American Medical Association for trying to block group medicine. “Group medicine is here to stay,” he wrote. 

In turn, Permanente physicians at times provided medical care on credit for striking ILWU members. Henry Kaiser was in favor of unions. In 1954, Kaiser said problems can be averted “simply by genuine recognition that the right of collective bargaining . . . is sound, essential human relations. I agreed a long time ago that unions are here to stay.” 

In 1965, Kaiser received the AFL-CIO’s highest honor for his achievements in voluntary medical care, housing and labor relations. Previous winners included former President Harry Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  

To view Arlo Guthrie’s tribute to Harry Bridges on Youtube: http://tinyurl.com/y87jt34
 

Top photograph by Otto Hagel, from Men and Machines, 1963; reproduced by permission of the Center for Creative Photography; © 1998 The University of Arizona Foundation
Ship photo courtesy of ILWU Archives, Anne Rand Research Library, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, San Francisco

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Climb the gangplank to learn about World War II’s social legacy

posted on March 13, 2010

Photo courtesy of Red Oak Victory

By Ginny McPartland
If you grew up in the Bay Area, or anywhere in America for that matter, you’re missing the boat if you haven’t been out to experience the Red Oak Victory ship docked on the Richmond waterfront. Granted it’s difficult to find, and in fact, you may never have heard of it. Not to worry, most people haven’t yet visited the Rosie the Riveter National Park where the ship is found.

The Red Oak Victory, built in the Kaiser Richmond shipyards in 1944, is a huge hulk of seaworthy steel that embodies a million stories pertinent to our society’s past. The ammunition ship, saved from scrap in 1998 by the Richmond Museum of History, serves as the chief artifact of the home front city’s museum collection. Volunteers have renovated much of the ship, which carried essential cargo for battles in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. www.ssredoakvictory.com

Richmond, and other Bay Area shipyards, figured fantastically in WWII home front America. The Bay Area was radically changed forever by the phenomenal influx of 200,000 shipyard workers and their families from around the nation. Every type of individual was represented in the newly configured social structure of California.

The legacy of World War II’s sociological impact is fully explored and documented in books and other items in the Red Oak’s museum gift shop. Notable examples are: “To Place Our Deeds” by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore; and “World War II Shipyards by the Bay” by Nicholas A. Veronico.

Red Oak mast

Just a few changes nudged by the war: Women working with men in industrial settings for equal pay; blacks and minorities working with whites for comparable pay; the emergence of professional child care centers; employment for the disabled; and affordable prepaid preventive health care provided by employers.
The medical care program started in the wartime shipyards lives on as Kaiser Permanente and is well documented in Tom Debley’s book “Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care,” published in 2009 by Permanente Press.

Changes in the status of women and minorities largely reverted after the war, but the seeds were deeply planted for the civil rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s.

Now for my confession: I grew up in Richmond, and I had never seen the shipyards or the Red Oak Victory until recently. My first visit to the floating museum was only a few weeks ago. Bay Area Historian Steve Gilford, a director on the museum board, gave me two tours of Shipyard 3 and the Red Oak. My eyes were opened to the treasure that is preserved in the depths of this honey-combed hunk of war grey welded and riveted steel.

The ship experience starts with a climb up the gangplank, a portable, suspended aluminum staircase to the main deck. From there, you step over the raised rims of the hatchways and navigate steel ladders to the various compartments of the midship house and the deckhouse. Down from the main deck you’ll find the museum, gift shop, and meeting room in a cleaned-up cargo hold.

Industrial mixer for batter

Ship's galley griddle ready for pancakes

One cheery way to introduce yourself to the historic waterfront is to partake of the $6 pancake breakfast offered on the Red Oak Victory once a month from April to October. The first one for 2010 is April 11.

To get to the Red Oak Victory, take I80 to 580 West. Stay on the freeway past the Rosie the Riveter park exit and take Canal Boulevard instead. Follow Canal all the way to the bay and wind your way through the industrial area to Berth 6A.

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“New Economy of Medicine:” An Idea for Which the Time Has Come?

posted on March 9, 2010

By Tom Debley

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen has taken to the pages of Business Week magazine to argue we would better off with health care systems in which doctors and insurers are on the same side of the ledger as the patient.  That would be a system such as Kaiser Permanente.  So what is the difference between his position and that of Sidney R. Garfield, the physician co-founder of Kaiser Permanente? Well, 65 years.

Professor Christensen, an expert on the topic of disruptive innovation, says that to do otherwise means “we’re guilty of business model malpractice on a grand scale.” As the headline on Christensen’s article put it, “The way to cut costs is to put care and insurance in the same bed.”

Dr. Sidney R. Garfield in 1975

Dr. Garfield, in designing Kaiser Permanente, made that argument 65 years ago when he addressed the Multnomah County Medical Association on April 4, 1945.

Garfield, talking about what he called his “new economy of medicine,” responded to the belief expressed a day earlier by another physician who claimed the most expensive thing in a hospital was an empty bed.

“He wasn’t referring to our hospital,” Garfield told his Portland, Oregon, audience, referring to the first Kaiser Permanente hospital in the Pacific Northwest, built during World War II in Vancouver, Washington.

“The most expensive thing in our hospital is a filled hospital bed,” Garfield added. “This new economy is geared to the preventive medicine of the future. It puts the patient, the doctor, the hospital, the employer and the insurance company all on the same side of the ledger. They all benefit by the patient remaining well.”

Garfield was a disruptive innovator long before the modern term was coined by Professor Christensen in 1995.  As Garfield once said, “We are talking about changes – and changes are irritating and disturbing, but being disturbed is essential to progress.”  (See my earlier blog, “Disruptive Innovation” at the Core of Kaiser Permanente History.)

Argues Christensen today, integrated delivery systems, including Kaiser Permanente, “can provide better care at 20 to 30 percent lower cost. Clearly, systemic problems require systemic solutions.”

If Dr. Garfield was 65 years ahead of the curve on that one, consider that it was 50 years ago this spring that he first argued that the computer should become the center of medical care delivery. Last week, on March 3, he would have been smiling as Kaiser Permanente announced that every medical facility within its health system — 431 medical offices and 36 hospitals — is now equipped with Kaiser Permanente Health Connect®, the largest private sector electronic health record in the world.

We’ll have more to say about Dr. Garfield and the computer on the 50th anniversary of his first talk on that topic in May.

Tom Debley is director of Kaiser Permanente’s Heritage Resources program and author of “The Story of Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care,” available directly from the publisher, The Permanente Press, as well as  from Amazon.com both in paperback and on Kindle.

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Henry Kaiser’s Legacy Woven into Rich California Tapestry

posted on November 26, 2009
Kaiser on horseback at site of his first California road project

Kaiser on horseback at site of his first California road project

What do Henry Kaiser, Carol Burnett, and George Lucas have in common? Not obvious? How about John Madden, romance novelist Danielle Steel, bodybuilder Joe Weider – and Henry Kaiser? Not intuitive? OK, what about Clint Eastwood, restaurateur Alice Waters, and Color Purple author Alice Walker? Still stumped?

Try this combination: Henry Kaiser, Earl Warren, Leland Stanford, architect Julia Morgan, Hiram Johnson, photographer Dorothea Lange, pilot Amelia Earhart, and polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk. Starting to see a pattern here? These famous historical figures are all recent inductees into the California Hall of Fame.

Henry Kaiser, 20th Century industrialist and co-founder of Kaiser Permanente Health Plan, will be officially inducted into the California Hall of Fame (launched in 2006) in December.  This will be Kaiser’s eighth inclusion in lists of hall-of-fame honorees, including the U.S. Labor Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C., where he was honored in 1990.

California Gov. Arnold Swartzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced the 2009 list of honorees this fall. They are (alphabetically): entertainer Carol Burnett, former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, governor and U.S. senator Hiram Johnson (19th Century), decathlete and philanthropist Rafer Johnson, Henry Kaiser, philanthropist and peace activist Joan Kroc, filmmaker George Lucas, football commentator John Madden, gay rights advocate Harvey Milk, artist Fritz Scholder, author Danielle Steel, fitness and bodybuilding pioneer Joe Weider, and Air Force test pilot General Chuck Yeager.

Inductees

To learn more about the 2009 inductees and the 38 from previous years, go to

http://californiamuseum.org/exhibits/halloffame/inductees

Schwarzenegger said the intent of the hall of fame is to highlight the broad range of California interests by honoring trailblazers who have distinguished themselves in more than one field and “impacted the world with their overall courage, determination, and creativity.”

Henry Kaiser, it can’t be disputed, personifies the governor’s definition of California’s best and brightest. His amazing career began in 1913 when he bought a failing road-building company and turned it to success with innovation in paving techniques and branching into building levees and dams.

When Kaiser lost his bid to build the Shasta Dam, he started a cement company to provide the six million tons needed for the northern California project and quickly became the world’s largest cement producer.

Kaiser's Barge 21 on Bay Bridge construction

Kaiser's Barge 21 on Bay Bridge construction

He played a major role in the construction of such pre-War wonders as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, and the 1933-built Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. He even built roads in Cuba and levees in Mississippi.

During World War II, Kaiser established West Coast shipyards whose workers built war ships at record-breaking speed. Kaiser employed a mix of skilled and unskilled workers that included the first women shipyard workers, as well as African-Americans, Chinese, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

Making of a health care program

Taking care of workers, many transplanted from the South and other parts of the country, entailed the creation of a health care program that placed emphasis on workers’ safety and a healthy lifestyle to avoid illness and injury. With 100,000 shipyard workers in the four Richmond, Calif. shipyards alone, the Kaiser Health Plan became the largest civilian medical care program on the Home Front of World War II.

Sidney Garfield, MD, developed and ran the medical care program, based on a prepaid, group practice model he had found successful on earlier Kaiser worker care programs. When the shipbuilding contracts evaporated at the end of the War, Kaiser and Garfield opened the health plan to the public. Eventually, union agreements kept the plan afloat and allowed it to grow to serve 8.5 million members today.

After the War, Kaiser turned to other industrial endeavors — manufacturing automobiles, homes, dishwashers, aluminum, steel, chemicals, electronics, and aeronautics.  But Kaiser always wished — and believed — that he would be best remembered for his work to provide better health care for all people.

In the decade before his death in 1967, Kaiser often said:

“Of all the things I’ve done, I expect only to be remembered for . . .  filling the people’s greatest need — good health.”

– Ginny McPartland

Kaiser Permanente Historian Tom Debley will be interviewed Tuesday, Dec. 1, on Capitol Public Radio (KXJZ 90.9 FM) about Henry Kaiser’s legacy and his induction into the California Hall of Fame. The interview will air on Insight with Jeffrey Callison from 10:05  to 11:18 a.m.  For more information:

http://capradio.org/programs/insight

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