San Francisco Chronicle Magazine Profiles Dr. Kevin Grumbach

The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine on Sunday profiled Kevin Grumbach, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital, chair of family and community medicine at the University of California-San Francisco and a proponent of a Canadian-style "single-payer" national health care system. According to Grumbach, the best way to provide health care is for a single government entity to reimburse providers -- much like if the Medicare program were expanded to cover all U.S. residents, the Chronicle reports. Grumbach said that the issue of the uninsured is "a simmering, very real crisis" but added that it "is one people can tune out unless you have the dying patients there in front of you in the hospital every day." Grumbach said that a single-payer health care system likely will not be implemented in the United States in the near future, but he added, "I will never give up being hopeful that we will one day have a health care system ... that I can say is fair, high-quality, achieves some basic justice and makes health care a human right" (Hall, San Francisco Chronicle, 6/6).