[MUSIC]
Looking back this may well have been the most
extraordinary experiment in the delivery of
health care the world's ever seen.
When World War II ended, Henry Kaiser offered
America a plan for nationwide health care.
Based on the medical care program
Dr. Sidney Garfield created in the
Great Depression and expanded for Kaiser’s
200,000 shipbuilders during the war.
This was the great experiment described by
Dr. Cecil Cutting, one of the first physicians
to join Sidney Garfield.
And Henry Kaiser always pointed to
Sidney Garfield as the genius behind the experiment.
“If your ideas are half as good as you say they are”,
he once told Garfield, “they are good for the whole country.”
The bashful 38-year-old physician seems destined
to become one of the outstanding men in the
American medical profession.
Sidney Garfield was making history by 1945
when he captured the imagination of
radio commentator Arthur Gaeth.
“Simply put, Garfield proclaims that modern medicine
must have four cornerstones.
It must provide for pre-payment to give a
working budget and permit sound financial administration.
It must provide opportunity for doctors
to work together in groups.
so that they can function more efficiently.
It must provide adequate equipment, opportunities
for research and study,
and above all it must become preventative medicine.
A gifted surgeon, Garfield had built the
nation's largest civilian medical care
program on the home front of World War II.
His historic work forever changed American medicine.
Kaiser, the industrialist, is powerful enough.
But the Kaiser plan with Sidney Garfield is
the great big social idea to come out of the war.
But immediately after World War II, many
attacked his plan,
calling it socialized medicine.
To help him defend his position,
Garfield turned to Ray Lyman Wilbur,
a national physician leader who was
president of Stanford University.
I started telling him about this opposition
and how unjust it was. He said, ‘Nothing new
or great has ever been achieved without great opposition.’
He said, ‘You're very fortunate.
If you weren't being opposed, you wouldn't
be doing anything worthwhile.’
You know that that helped me a great deal.
From then on I wasn't concerned about opposition anymore.
Garfield was passionate about preventing illness,
social responsibility, health education,
personalized care, and innovation.
An example, says Irving Klitsner, a physician
who joined The Permanente Medical Group in 1950,
was Garfield's insistence on personalizing patient care.
The question of giving personal care always came up
because that's one of the things that outside medicine
accused us of - of being socialized, of being very impersonal.
The same was true of Dr. Garfield's zeal for innovation.
When he came around, he didn’t come around just to
reinforce these things, he'd come around and say,
“What are you doing that's new and innovative?’
Indeed, innovation was key to Dr. Garfield's postwar career.
He gained fame for hospital designs in the 1950s.
Then he began to explore how Kaiser Permanente
could become a total health system of care.
In 1960, he asked Dr. Morris Collen, who also had
a degree in electrical engineering, to look into something new.
He said, ‘I think the time has come for us to
use computers to help physicians take better
care of our patients.’
TPMG under its first executive director,
Dr. Cecil Cutting, launched a research program
led by Dr. Collen that put Kaiser Permanente in the
forefront of pioneering institutions in the
development of the field of medical informatics.
When Garfield died in 1984, he was working on his
last research program - Total Health,
his desire to help patients stay healthy,
diagnose illness early, and take good care of them when they're sick.
To this day, Garfield's vision has sustained
Kaiser Permanente’s leadership and voice in
national health care policy.
I would like to give credit to Dr. Sidney Garfield,
who not only started the program, but gave the
program its vision and all the terrific qualities
that we now enjoy.
[MUSIC]