The Garfield Memorial Fund: Helping KP Clinicians and Researchers Come Through the Front Door With Their Ideas

Sidney R Garfield, MD, physician co-founder of Kaiser Permanente (KP), was a pioneer whose ideas about prepaid health insurance, physicians practicing in groups, preventive health care, and medical services under one roof were seen as radical in the 1930s. Through his dedication and efforts, as well as those of other early KP physician leaders, these ideas became the blueprint for KP. As Paul de Kruif says in his book, Life Among the Doctors, Sidney Garfield was “an innovator who has invented a democratic system of medical care.”1