Michael Fine

Michael Fine, MD, is an author, community organizer, and family physician and public health provocateur. He serves as chief health strategist for the City of Central Falls, Rhode Island. Dr. Fine served in the cabinet of Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee as director of the department of health from 2011–2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs, services and public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year.

Dr. Fine’s career has been devoted to health care 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. He was also 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 physician-in-chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. He was cochair 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 the Lown Institute, Crossroads of RI, RICARES and the Scituate Health Alliance, which he founded.

Dr. Fine is the author of Health Care Revolt, the novel Abundance, and The Bull and Other Stories. He is the coauthor, with James W. Peters, of The Nature of Health, a study of health care services, human rights, society, technology, and industry, and The Zero Calorie Diet, a look at the culture of excess through the lens of fasting.