Grab dinner in the DC, bring your plate, and join us in the Swarthmore Room (DC 119)

for a conversation about what's ailing our healthcare system, how we got here, 

and a social movement dedicated to expanding access to primary care for all Americans  

Students, staff, and faculty are welcome. This event will be of special interest to pre-med/pre-health students, as well as those exploring careers in healthcare administration, health policy, and public health leadership. 

Click here to RSVP

About the speaker 

Dr. Michael Fine, Haverford College Class of 1975, is an award-winning author, community organizer, and family physician. Dr. Fine is President and Board Chair of Primary Care for All Americans, an organization devoted to building a social movement to develop a health care system for the US that is for people, not for profit, and he serves as Chief Health Strategist for the City of Central Falls, Rhode Island. 

Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health 2011-2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, 450 public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year. Dr. Fine’s career as both a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare has been devoted to healthcare reform and the care of underserved populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, with a healthcare unit serving 20,000 people a year and a staff of over 85 physicians, psychiatrists, mental health workers, nurses, and other health professionals. He was a founder and Managing Director of HealthAccessRI, the nation’s first statewide direct primary care organization, which made prepaid primary care available to people without employer-provided health insurance.

Dr. Fine practiced for 16 years in urban Pawtucket, Rhode Island and rural Scituate, Rhode Island. He was the Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and was Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. 

Dr. Fine helped found the Scituate Health Alliance, a community-based, population-focused non-profit organization, which made Scituate the first community in the United States to provide primary medical and dental care to all town residents. Dr. Fine is a past President of the Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians and was an Open Society Institute/George Soros Fellow in Medicine as a Profession from 2000 to 2002. He has served on a number of legislative committees for the Rhode Island General Assembly, has chaired the Primary Care Advisory Committee for the Rhode Island Department of Health, and sat on both the Urban Family Medicine Task Force of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Advisory Council to the National Health Services Corps. 

Dr. Fine’s career prior to and just after becoming a physician shaped his view of community healthcare. His early professional experience included jobs as a printer, a metal worker, a New York City taxi driver, and a VISTA volunteer and community health organizer in the South Bronx. As a National Health Services Corps Scholar in the mid 1980s, Fine worked for three years in rural Tennessee, in the fifth poorest county in America. In that community, with an illiteracy rate of 60 percent, he experienced the inextricable link between education and health, income and health, and health care and local economic development.

Dr. Fine's 2023 book, On Medicine as Colonialism, uses the COVID-19 pandemic and many other examples to show the costly failure of the American health care system in bold relief. Hospitals, insurance companies, Big Pharma, specialists, and even primary care doctors have all become tools of the new health profiteers. On Medicine as Colonialism shows how the American health care system cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world. Focusing on how health care profiteers co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid to extract resources from communities, this book reveals how medicine and health care have become tools of a new health colonialism, turning medicine on its head, so that individuals and communities lose their agency, health becomes impossible, and profits are used to dismantle democracy itself. 

Read more about Dr. Fine's work in Haverford Magazine