New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (review)

Abstract

In a brief but compelling monograph, Michael Grey, who is both a practicing physician and a historian of medicine, attempts to give the medical programs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) their "historical due" (p. 168). Not only does he detail the development of health-care cooperatives and other forms of prepaid health plans in rural America that defined the FSA's medical program in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he also highlights the ways in which these [End Page 399] programs anticipated later developments in group practice and problems in the delivery of managed care.