Sidney Garfield: Visionary Who Turned Sick Care Into Health Care September 10, 2009

Tom Debley, author of "The Story of Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary who Turned Sick Care into Health Care," will talk about Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, the physician co-founder of Kaiser Permanente, who believed that health care should be a right not a privilege and worked over five decades, against opposition, to broaden access to health care.

From FDR forward politicians have tried and failed to bring Americans universal health care. Garfield advocated for universal care throughout his life after entering medicine at the low point of the Great Depression when the nation knew a desperation for quality care at an affordable price. He was a man who went from obscurity running a Depression era hospital serving the men who built the Colorado River Aqueduct to the physician leader behind one of the most successful non-profit, group medical practice health care delivery systems in history. At the end of his life, former U.S. Health Education & Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano said of him, "Let us hope that ... we can match the sweeping vision and the earthy practicality of leaders like Sidney Garfield."

Dr. Garfield, early in his career, said quite simply that people don't want to be sick. He did not invent prepayment or group medical practice. Nor was he the first to advocate measures to prevent illness. His genius lay in figuring out how to knit prepayment, group practice and prevention into a delivery system - with most everything under one roof with prepayment paying doctors for keeping people healthy and caring for them when they are sick.

Debley tells the story of this American born to Russian immigrants who experimented with a new kind of health care delivery system which President Barack Obama has pointed to as an example of a kind of quality, affordable medical care that is possible with health care reform.

Tickets at the door: $10 OHA Members / $15 Non-Members.

Official Website: http://www.oaklandheritage.org