New Members Knocking
In 1970, a new state law had given state employees the option of selecting "panel medicine plans" such as Group Health for their medical benefits. Thousands of state employees in and around Olympia were excited to get this new right, but had nowhere to exercise it.
Meanwhile, Group Health was anxious about its burgeoning membership. Clinics were becoming understaffed, and delays in getting appointments were becoming a chronic headache.
In Olympia, a small group of state employees led by David C. Carson incorporated its own "Group Health Cooperative of Olympia" on April 2, 1970. The group had no intention of going it alone, and made a point of inviting Group Health officials to this and every subsequent meeting.
Persistent Suitors
The Group Health Board of Trustees, now headed by Eleanor Brand, was cool to the idea of launching a new medical center 70 miles south of its central facilities to serve the 150 current members in the Olympia area. The board informed the Olympia group that it wanted to open center in Tacoma first.
But Carson and his group were persistent suitors. A formal liaison committee was organized, and by July 1970, Group Health found itself committed to opening an Olympia facility within two years. George Bolotin, a Group Health trustee who was the board's longtime "architect in residence" stepped down to supervise the design and construction of the new center, sited near St. Peter's Hospital.
Dr. Miles
Dr. Ward Miles agreed to head up the center staff. "They asked me," Miles remembered, "because nobody else wanted to go. This is the way I got into several good things." Dr. Miles had earned a reputation as a maverick among mavericks on the medical staff. He was a Quaker, had been a Conscientious Objector during World War II, and had developed an interest in both psychology and medicine during his wartime service as an orderly in the mental ward of the Pennsylvania State Hospital. Dr. Miles joined Group Health in 1954, and became one of its leading advocates of family practice and of integrated approaches to physical and mental health. (Dr. Miles was elected to the Board of Trustees following his retirement in 1984.)
As Group Health was entering Olympia, Dr. Miles had just returned from a stint in the Peace Corps. He saw the Olympia position as an opportunity to escape Group Health's sometimes intense internal politics and to "start a different model of family care" (Crowley, 138).
Group Health Arrives in Olympia
But there was a hitch. Restrictive language in the Thurston County Medical Bureau's charter enjoined its members from assisting "closed panel" doctors or their patients. Group Health lawyer John Riley, according to a press report, "heatedly charged the Medical Bureau with being 30 to 50 years behind the times" (Crowley, 138). Thurston County's medical establishment got the point and grudgingly amended the bureau charter in January 1972.
The Olympia cooperative dissolved itself on May 23, 1972. Two months later, more than a thousand Olympia-area citizens and new Group Health members attended the formal opening of the Olympia Medical Center.
