As school superintendent, Kimball had full knowledge of the numbers
of teachers “insured” through their sick benefit fund, and now as
administrator of the Baylor Hospital, he gained access to the hospital’s
finances, its costs and revenues, and, in particular, how much money
Baylor was bleeding when caring for Dallas teachers. One of Kimball’s
young protégés, Bryce Twitty, conjectured, “Why we couldn’t do for sick
people [teachers] what lumber camps and railroads had done for their
employees ... [referring to] company doctors”^6 who tended to local
workers, benefitting both the companies and the well-being of the labor
force.
In the early fall of 1929, Kimball approached his old friends at the
Dallas schools administration, proposing a type of hospital prepayment
program, where teachers could make a similar monthly payment to budget
against future hospital bills. There were no national actuarial data to guide
Kimball; life insurance companies had always shied away from health
care, and no one had worked out the statistics between healthcare demand
and costs. How much to charge teachers? No one knew, but Kimball did
have the thorough records from his days as superintendent. “Those records
... were the only actuarial material I could find anywhere in the U.S. I had
designed the forms myself to extract this information, having been an
insurance lawyer. [During the fall, advertisements were circulated among
teachers] that if 75 percent of the teaching group would sign up and send
in 50 cents each month beginning with their November sick-benefit dues,
Baylor Hospital would accept the amount as prepayment for hospital care
when needed.”^7
Serendipity for both the teachers and the hospital dictated that the stock
market crash and the launching of the program happened within hours of
each other. Not surprisingly, teachers subscribed in droves, and by
December, more than 75 percent of all teachers in Dallas subscribed, and
on December 20, 1929, the plan went live, coinciding with Christmas
vacation. The success of “The Plan” was immediate, and employees of
Dallas’s Republic National Bank and the Times Herald soon joined; in fact,
408 employee groups with 23,000 members subscribed over the next five
years. Kimball had saved Baylor University’s hospital, rescuing it from
insolvency and, like a pied piper, ushered a steady stream of patients to its
doors. As medical costs were beginning to explode, patients were happy as
well: an accident or serious illness no longer meant financial ruination.