“On Medicine as Colonialism”. October book tour with Dr. Michael Fine

Dr. Michael Fine, RINewsToday contributing writer, publishes a new monthly short story with us every month. All of his stories incorporate references to Rhode Island, and specifically the Blackstone Valley that readers will recognize.

Fine is also the author of a series of books. His latest, On Medicine as Colonialism, shows how the American healthcare system “cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world”, as described by PM Press, which goes on to say, “In this strident, necessary, meticulously researched book Michael Fine 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….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.”

“Fine writes with the eye of both a humanist and a practitioner. . . . His passion for individual lives and concern for the common good is what drives his outrage at what has been wrought.” —Christopher Koller, president of the Milbank Fund. Koller is the former Health Commissioner for Rhode Island.

Fine began his October book tour in the area:

Fine is also the author of:

Rhode Island Stories 

https://www.stillwaterbooksri.com/rhode-island-stories-0

Abundance 

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1002

Health Care Revolt 

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=963

The Bull and Other Stories

https://www.stillwaterbooksri.com/bull-and-other-stories-hc

Podcast: Alternative Fictions: Rhode Island Stories from Michael Fine 

https://linktr.ee/drmichaelfine

Read more short stories by Michael Fine, go here: https://rinewstoday.com/dr-michael-fine/

Michael Fine, MD is currently Health Policy Advisor in Central Falls, Rhode Island and Senior Population Health and Clinical Services Officer at Blackstone Valley Health Care, Inc. He is facilitating a partnership between the City and Blackstone to create the Central Falls Neighborhood Health Station, the US first attempt to build a population based primary care and public health collaboration that serves the entire population of a place.

He has also recently been named Health Liaison to the City of Pawtucket. Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from February of 2011 until March of 2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, overseeing 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 under-served populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, overseeing a healthcare unit servicing nearly 20,000 people a year, with 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 organization making prepaid, reduced fee-for-service 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 is the former Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and the former Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. He was co-chair of the Allied Advocacy Group for Integrated Primary Care.

He convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices. He currently serves on the Boards of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s largest service organization for the homeless, the Lown Institute, the George Wiley Center, and RICARES. Dr. Fine founded 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 to2002. 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.