July 15, 2013
Labor unions offer early support for nascent Permanente Health Plan
After World War II, the experience of the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan for union members led to their support in the early peacetime years.
“Kaiser launches 747th — and last — wartime ship,” article in the Oakland Tribune, August 13, 1945. Expanding the shipyard workers’ health care plan to the public sparked the birth of the Kaiser Permanente program.
As World War II neared an end, the Permanente Health Plan was looking at a dramatic shift in its member base. Wartime shipyard closures loomed, and the future of the plan during peacetime would hinge on attracting new members to the community.
Given Henry J. Kaiser’s support for labor, it was not surprising that labor unions were among the early member groups. Bay Area workers — Oakland city employees, union typographers, street car drivers, and carpenters — embraced the Permanente Health Plan and its emphasis on preventive medicine.
One of the first and largest unions to endorse the plan was The International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union.
On June 7, 1945, the Stewards and Executive Council of the ILWU’s Oakland unit voted unanimously to make coverage in the health insurance plan of the Permanente Foundation a part of its future negotiations with employers. The executive council also requested that employers pay for the plan’s premiums.
We want our Permanente!
An article in the ILWU’s The Dispatcher explained:
“. . . Permanente operates on three principles: prepayment . . . group practice of medicine (the hospital has 84 doctors on its staff, many of them specialists . . . and adequate facilities.)"
Related to adequate facilities, the article noted that a group practice health plan like Permanente could afford the latest medical equipment, which individual, fee-for-service physicians did not have.
Preventive care takes center stage
“The most important provision of the plan . . . is that the first two visits to the hospital are included in the insurance."
“A spokesman for (Permanente) explained that the hospital was interested in really affording the worker medical security. If the patient had to pay for the first two visits, he would be deterred from using the plan until an ailment became necessarily serious.”
“The hospital's facilities are open to all groups with no segregation of patients because of creed or color,” the article reported.
Within five years, by 1950, ILWU president Harry Bridges had brought all 6,000 union members working up and down the West Coast into the Permanente Health Plan.
The union’s agreement with Permanente leader Sidney Garfield, MD, included opening a medical facility in San Pedro near Long Beach. Up to that point, the health plan had only one Southern California hospital, which provided care for the workers at the Kaiser Steel Plant in Fontana.
