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Air Dates: August 15-21, 2022

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Dr. Michael Fine was outraged—like a lot of Americans.  So he traveled to see first-hand the human cost of this war.

Dr. Michael Fine serves as the Chief Health Strategist for the city of Central Falls, R.I. and as a family physician with a practice in Rhode Island.  He is the author of several books, including “Health Care Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System, and Resuscitate Democracy—All at the Same Time,” published in 2018, “Abundance,” a novel about love, war and redemption, based on his experience as a volunteer during the Liberian Civil War, published in 2019, “Rhode Island Stories,” published in 2021, among others.  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 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.  He also convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices.

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Fine recounts his visit to the border of Poland and Ukraine as a member of a humanitarian effort to help Ukrainians who were fleeing Putin’s war in the spring of 2022.

“Story in the Public Square” broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. In Rhode Island and southeastern New England, the show is broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m., 5:30 p.m. ET, and Sundays at 2:30 a.m. & 2:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.