Who Owns Kaiser Permanente?

The organization traces its roots to 1933, when surgeon Sidney Garfield borrowed money to build Contractors General Hospital near Desert Center, California, to treat workers building the Colorado River aqueduct. When insurance companies paid slowly, Garfield accepted prepayment directly from employers, an early version of the prepaid group practice model.

Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, whose firms employed thousands at Grand Coulee Dam and later at California shipyards during World War II, adopted Garfield's model for his workforce. At its wartime peak, the program covered 90,000 shipyard workers at Richmond, California.

After the war ended and shipyard employment collapsed, Kaiser and Garfield opened the plan to the public. On July 21, 1945, the Permanente Health Plan began accepting public enrollment. The name combined Kaiser's name with Permanente Creek, which ran through his first cement plant.

Enrollment passed 300,000 within the first decade, helped by contracts with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Retail Clerks Union. The organization expanded into Oregon in the 1940s, then Hawaii, Colorado, Ohio, and later Georgia, the Mid-Atlantic, and Washington.

The model drew sustained opposition from organized medicine. The American Medical Association fought prepaid group practice for decades, and early Permanente physicians faced professional sanctions for practicing outside fee-for-service norms. The consortium's integrated structure nonetheless became a reference model for managed care.

Kaiser built its first Oakland flagship hospital in 1962 and continued expanding across California. By the 1990s it was the largest health maintenance organization in the United States. The organization invested heavily in electronic health records, completing a multibillion-dollar deployment of its KP HealthConnect system in the 2010s, then the largest civilian EHR implementation in the country.

In 2023 Kaiser announced Risant Health, initially funded with a commitment of about $5 billion, to acquire nonprofit community health systems and operate them under a value-based care model. Geisinger joined in March 2024 and Cone Health in December 2024. Combined 2025 operating revenue reached $127.7 billion, making Kaiser the largest nonprofit health system in the country by revenue.