Another entry in the “interesting tidbits of history” category…

I’m deep in the midst of a riveting book about the industrial side of the US involvement in WWII, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in WWII by Arthur Herman.

An aside in the book involves the medical innovation helped along by Henry Kaiser, who got his start in road paving in the burgeoning American West, then branched out into dam building. His firm became part of the Six Companies consortium that built the Boulder (later Hoover) Dam in Nevada. He went on to build the Grand Coulee dam as well. It was there that he became involved in a unique means of providing health care to his thousands of workers, a pre-payment agreement with innovative physician Sidney Garfield, MD.

It was just a few short years later that Kaiser took the leap that really put him in the history books, when he accepted an order to build ships for the British war effort even while the US was still on the sidelines. That led him to build the Richmond Shipyards outside San Francisco, which set him up to accept American contracts when the war came to our shores. And that led him to be the top producer of the Liberty Ship, the key merchant marine element in saving the British, supplying our troops, and winning the war.

Kaiser brought along his new medical provision ideas to the shipyards he built, not just in California, but in Oregon and Washington as well. Eventually he made the medical side of things its own division of his business empire, adding the name of a creek on his lodge property in Santa Clara County, California.

And that’s where Kaiser Permanente originated. Now you know the rest of the story.