Sidney R. Garfield (April 17, 1906[2] – December 29, 1984[1]) was an American physician and a pioneer of health maintenance organizations.
[7] The hospital started as fee-for-service, but insurance companies were slow to pay, and non-payment was also a problem.
Garfield made an arrangement with Industrial Indemnity Exchange, the largest insurer on the Colorado River Aqueduct project.
The agreement with the insurance company was structured as a "prepayment" to the hospital[8]—a nickel a day per worker.
The field hospital served as the mid-level component of a three-tier medical care system that also included six well-equipped first aid stations at the individual shipyards, and the main Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland, California, where the most critical cases were treated.
In part due to wartime materials rationing, Garfield's original field hospital was a single-story wood frame structure designed in a simple modernist mode.
As the war came to an end, the Bay Area shipyards were rapidly scaled back and closed.