A surgeon in 1751, his friend Dr. Thomas Bond, convinced Ben Franklin to champion a progressive cause: the building of a public hospital. Through his hard work and political ingenuity, Franklin brought the skeptical legislature to the table, bargaining his way to use public money to build what would become Pennsylvania Hospital.
"Franklin proposed an institution that would provide --'free of charge'--the finest health care to everybody, 'whether inhabitants of the province or strangers,' even to the 'poor diseased foreigners"' (referring to the immigrants of German stock that the colonials tended to disparage and discriminate). Countering the Assembly's insistence that the hospital be built only with private donations, Franklin said:
"That won't work, it will never be enough, good health care costs a lot of money, remembering 'the distant parts of this province' in which 'assistance cannot be procured, but at an expense that neither [the sick-poor] nor their townships can afford.'

And besides, Franklin wrote,
"the good [that] particular men may do separately, in relieving the sick, is small, compared with what they may do collectively.'"