Ross-Loos Medical Group

Ross-Loos Medical Group was a comprehensive prepaid health services plan with 29 medical offices throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in California and a large multi-specialty hospital located on Temple Street (Los Angeles).

Ross-Loos was established in 1929 by two physicians, Donald E. Ross and H. Clifford Loos, older brother of writer Anita Loos. The plan consisted of monthly payments which assured benefits of medical and hospital care to over two thousand employees of Los Angeles County and the Department of Water and Power and their families.

The founders believed that health care could be improved by combining prepayment of services, eliminating the financial barriers faced by patients at the time of needed care, with the sharing of medical records and the ease of consultation in a medical group. The focus was on the improvement of medical care quality, rather than financial success, and many of the concepts in these plans built on a public health approach that encouraged prevention. These plans included prenatal care, well-baby visits, and immunizations in standard benefit packages, with small or no copayments, in an era when even the hospital costs of maternity stays were often excluded from traditional insurance.

Thus, Ross-Loos Medical Group was the first "health maintenance organization" (HMO) in the United States, a term that came into being in the 1970s.

Over several years many other employee groups, mostly governmental, joined the plan. Ross-Loos was so successful that the first small medical office on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles expanded into an enormous organization with nineteen medical offices and a large multi-specialty hospital on Temple Street in Los Angeles by 1979.

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