First some good news! The Rhode Island General Assembly passed two bills and created one study commission that helps us start getting better access to primary care in Rhode Island. Bill 2024-S 2716A establishes a primary care training sites program, which has been funded with $2.7 million in the 2025 state budget bill. Bill 2024-S2717A added […]
Michael Fine, MD
Michael Fine, MD, is a writer, community organizer, and family physician. He is the chief health strategist for the City of Central Falls, RI, and a former Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health, 2011–2015. He is currently the Board Vice Chair and Co-Founder of the Scituate Health Alliance, and is the recipient of the Barbara Starfield Award, the John Cunningham Award, and the June Rockwell Levy Public Service Award. He is the author of several books, medical, novels and short stories, including On Medicine and Colonialism, Rhode Island Stories, and The Bull and Other Stories, You can learn more about Michael at www.michaelfinemd.com
Posted inElection
Dr. Michael Fine: Will the real Democratic Party please stand up?
In the past week, it has become abundantly clear that the Democratic Party does not have a viable candidate for president, and equally clear that the Democratic Party can’t tell itself the truth and move on for the good of the country. Joe Biden has been a good president. But he’s not re-electable, something everyone else besides […]
Posted inEnvironment & Health
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about hospitals in Rhode Island this week
Lots of hospital-related news in Rhode Island this week. The Rhode Island Department of Health and the Attorney General approved the sale of Our Lady of Fatima and Roger Williams aka Charter Care, to something called The Centurion Foundation, a Georgia based non-profit, which I don’t know anything about. The seller is Prospect Medical Holdings, but with […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about eye ointment
Eye ointment? Yes, eye ointment. You see, in late April, the CDC announced there was a shortage of erythromycin eye ointment, which turned out to be a big deal. What? Isn’t erythromycin one of the oldest antibiotics that exist? Aren’t there a hundred or a thousand other eye ointments? Who cares about one old medicine? In fact, erythromycin was discovered in […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s not that crazy about making sure pharmacists are part of the primary care team
On these pages, an Op-Ed (Let Rhode Island Pharmacists Close the Primary Care Gap) by a number of trusted colleagues argued that allowing pharmacists to bill insurance directly for clinical services might close the primary care gap. I’m not sure where I stand on letting pharmacists bill insurance directly. On the one hand, pharmacists are critical […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about letting business people and lawyers control health care
What I am about to tell you is a true story. One that is happening now in a Rhode Island hospital. An 81-year-old man who still worked ten hours a day and was as strong as a bull was hit by a car as he crossed the street from the restaurant where he worked to his […]
Posted inOpinion
Dr. Michael Fine: Why this Jewish Zionist supports and thanks the protesters on college campuses
I’m a Jewish fella. I go to synagogue. I read the parsha (Torah portion) of the week, every week. I keep something approaching Kosher and keep something approaching Shabbos (which means I don’t work or travel Friday night and Saturday until sundown) imperfectly, but I think about it and feel it. I’m more Conservative than Orthodox and imperfect in […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about electronic medical records
You know the drill: the doctor, nurse practitioner, or PA walks into the exam room, sits down at the computer and looks at the computer screen, not at you. And then reads a bunch of questions for you to answer, many of which you’ve answered a hundred times before. And then said clinician types in your answers, clicking […]
Posted inOpinion
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s Crazy About Unionizing Healthcare Workers
Breaking news tells us that pharmacy professionals at two CVS corporate retail stores in Rhode Island, in Wakefield, and Westerly want to join The Pharmacy Guild, a trade union that represents pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, joining their colleagues from around the country who are engaging in similar union activities at CVS and Walgreens Boots Alliance […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about health care and private equity
There is lots of talk about health care and private equity lately, and the truth is worse than anyone knows. Too many greedy and unscrupulous people use the equity markets to make ungodly profits for themselves by using a legal process to extract wealth from governments, communities, and even from insurance companies, usually by buying […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s Crazy About Health Care and Pet Supplies
Pet food? Health care and pet food? No, dear reader, Dr Fine hasn’t gone crazy. There really is a link. In the Wall Street Journal of February 10, the distinguished long-time Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, who was arguing for desperately needed military aid to Ukraine, claimed that by spending an extra $35 billion, Russia was trying […]
Posted inNews
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about health insurance and private equity
A woman in Buffalo, NY, a nurse who works per diem with a primary care doctor, loses her insurance. She’s on medication for a chronic disease, and the medication runs out. So, she calls her doctor to schedule an appointment. But her doctor won’t see her. You don’t have insurance, she is told. Okay, she […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s Crazy in Health Care Times Two
A friend in her sixties called to ask if she should take the new RSV vaccine, which is being heavily promoted to people over sixty. That it is being so heavily promoted is driving me a little crazy. Here’s the skinny: RSV — respiratory syncytial virus — is a virus that has been around a […]
Posted inCity & Government
Dr. Michael Fine: Who speaks for democracy now?
A demagogue and three syncopats walked into a bar… The fake news debacle of the last week, a week in which thousands of people died in Gaza, the West Bank and Ukraine, was the confrontation in Congress between Representative Elaine Stefanik and the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. Everyone knows what […]
Posted inNews
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s Crazy About Hepatitis C, HIV, and Colon Cancer
Dr Francis Collins, the retired but long-time director of the National Institutes of Health, has been writing and talking recently about the need for the US to spend about $5 billion over five years to eliminate Hepatitis C in the US. It’s a great idea, on the face of it. There are about 2.7 million […]
Posted inCity & Government
Dr. Micheal Fine: A Path Forward for Democrats – A Primary for Vice President
Democrats need to quit worrying about Joe Biden’s age, and put together three or four credible candidates to primary Kamala Harris. Now. Here are my biases: I’m not a Democrat. I’m a fiscally cautious, socially cautious, free-speech thinking, small-government supporting, social justice talking, family values kind of guy. I called myself a radical left Republican until Donald Trump wrecked […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s crazy about getting an FMLA form filled out
A guy calls me out of the blue. I don’t know him from Adam. He got my number from a friend. He’s having a problem with healthcare. He can’t get his FLMA form filled out. He’s a patient of a community health center but he hasn’t been seen there since the pandemic started. His regular […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine: What’s Crazy about Primary Care in Rhode Island
Last week, a dear friend, whom I’ve known since she was a child and who is now pushing 40, shared some troubling news. Her family doctor had left, and they were struggling to find a new one. This predicament wasn’t just affecting the adults in their household; it also concerned their nine-year-old daughter, whom they […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine – What’s Crazy In Healthcare: Covid and Florida
I finally got Covid this week after flying to Florida to attend a family wedding. Getting Covid was no surprise – all of us will get it eventually – and I was lucky to have a relatively mild version – headache, congestion, fever, fatigue, and cough, bad for one night, worse the next but then […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine – What’s Crazy in Health Care: Generic and other medications
I suffered when the lilacs bloomed about three weeks ago. After more than six decades of being the only allergic person in an allergic family (my father, of blessed memory, used to say with some perverse pride that he was allergic to himself) I developed pollen allergies a few years ago, along with sudden empathy […]
Posted inColumns
Dr. Michael Fine – What’s crazy in healthcare
It should be reasonably safe for me to write about the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota, since the Mayo doesn’t do much in Rhode Island. According to press reports, the Mayo’s CEO threatened to move a billion-dollar project outside Minnesota, if the Minnesota legislature has the temerity to pass the controversial Keeping Nurses at the […]
Posted inColumns
Michael Fine: What’s crazy in health care today
In the United States, we have a health care market, not a health care system that provides the same set of essential services to all Americans. We’ve all gotten used to that – it makes for health care that is confusing and impersonal. But most of us can’t figure out how to change it, so […]