LOS ANGELES - Dr. F. Gene Dixon, a dentist who in 1955 helped make dental insurance eventually accessible to millions of Americans with the founding of the company now known as Delta Dental, has died. He was 84.
Dr. Dixon fell on the driveway outside his house in San Mateo, Calif., and suffered a head injury, said his wife, Rosemary. He died at a hospital the next day, Oct. 26.
When Dr. Dixon began his work, most people had not even heard of dental insurance.
"The very idea was unprecedented," Dr. Dixon said in a speech he gave in 1993 at the University of Nebraska College of Dentistry. "The insurance companies were saying that dentistry was uninsurable and the proof of this was that not a single insurer would offer it."
That began to change in the 1950s with a nudge from organized labor. In 1954, the president of the International Longshoremen's Warehouse Union told the dental community in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California that it was making $750,000 available to provide dental care to the children of union members.
Union officials approached dental associations in those states for help in setting up a pre-paid, free-choice dental care program, patterned after the medical insurance model.
The California Dental Association accepted the challenge in 1955, and eventually asked Dr. Dixon to run the program. He had a private practice in San Mateo and had set up a small program that offered dental care to welfare recipients, both of which helped prepare him for the work of designing and running the new program.
Under the plan, patients were free to choose from among a network of dentists who agreed to limit their fees and follow other guidelines. By creating big networks, "you create a situation where the charges are limited so the patients can afford co-payments and the companies that buy it can afford the premiums," said Gary D. Radine, president and chief executive of Delta Dental.
Dr. Dixon saw it as a means of improving dental care for Americans by increasing access. Others saw it differently.
"It was a controversial thing," Rosemary Dixon said. "Not everybody accepted that readily. They did not like a third-party intervention in a private practice."
In the 1960s the program became separate from the California Dental Association. Unions representing various professions, including aerospace, teachers, and retail clerks, were interested in offering dental care coverage in their benefits packages.
As the company won converts, "It set the stage for what was to happen in the early 1960s, when a trend began on the West Coast that would, over a 10-year period, engulf the entire United States," Dr. Dixon said in the 1993 speech.
Helping to reshape the business side of the dental industry was not an early goal of Dr. Dixon. Born April 13, 1923, in Superior, Neb., he graduated from the University of Nebraska College of Dentistry in 1947 and served three tours of duty in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War.
After being discharged, he went into private practice in November 1952.
He retired as chief executive of Delta Dental in 1977. Many of the practices he initiated endure. The number of Americans with dental plans has expanded to about 170 million, Radine said.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Dixon leaves five children, Donald of Champaign, Ill.; Alicia Dixon Docter of Seattle; Barry of Montana; Sally White of Tehachapi, Calif.; and Kathryn Dixon of London; his stepmother, Bobbie of San Mateo; and five grandchildren.
