As part of an ambitious effort to overhaul America’s health-care system, Philip Lee bucked entrenched bias by including a dose of racial justice—tying the new Medicare law to hospital desegregation.
Photo: Stanford Medicine
Philip R. Lee, ’45, MD ’48, died October 27 in New York City of heart arrhythmia. He was 96.
Lee belonged to a family of physicians that included his four siblings and his father, Russel, Class of 1916, MD ’20, a member of the Stanford School of Medicine faculty from 1918 to 1960. His mother, Dorothy, was a suffragist committed to environmental and social issues. At their home on Stanford’s campus, his parents were known to have hosted writer Wallace Stegner and artist Frida Kahlo.
When Philip was a child, his father founded the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, now the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. The clinic was one of the first group practices in the United States and an affront to the conservative American Medical Association, which viewed doctors’ collectives as a challenge to the establishment. The clash would echo through the younger Dr. Lee’s career. In a 2015 article in Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging, he recalled being labeled a communist by the San Francisco Medical Society president for supporting a bill in the early 1960s that proposed to offer health-care coverage for patients 65 and older—the bill was narrowly defeated but laid the groundwork for what would ultimately become Medicare.
Named assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—one year after Johnson steered the landmark Civil Rights Act through a contentious Congress—Lee promoted the new Medicare program to expand public access to health care as it faced two massive roadblocks: an intransigent AMA loath to cede authority and a legacy of segregated medical facilities.
The program was designed so that any hospital found to be discriminating against patients based on race, creed or national origin would be ineligible to receive Medicare funds. By 1967, compliance among the nation’s 7,000 hospitals had reached 95 percent.
Two years later, Lee returned to San Francisco to become chancellor of UCSF, having been elected by the regents in a 13 to 12 vote over the doctor who’d once called him a communist. He integrated the school, established a health-policy institute that bears his name, advised the Clinton administration on health-care reform, endorsed President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, taught at Stanford and mentored countless students.
A lighthearted spirit, Lee loved bawdy limericks, says his nephew Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California. “He was hilarious and open, and never judgmental.”
Near the end of his life, Lee asked his wife, Roz Lasker, to reread to him President Johnson’s last speech about the nation’s unfinished civil rights agenda. “That is the way Phil thought about his own life,” she says, prompting her to reflect on his work as a mentor. “Considering how much still needs to be done to achieve social justice and equity in health, this may be his most important legacy.”
In addition to his wife, Lee is survived by five children, one stepdaughter, five grandchildren, two stepgrandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
John Roemer is a freelance writer based in Sausalito, Calif. Email him at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
