As HHS Assistant Secretary for Health, Philip Randolph Lee, M.D., leads the U.S. Public Health Service at a time when one of the country's major national issue is health care reform --how to promote the health of the public, how to ensure universal access, how to ensure quality, how to contain rapidly rising costs and how to pay for it. The programs of the Public Health Service that Dr. Lee directs contribute to virtually all those objectives.
Dr. Lee was sworn in as HHS assistant secretary for health on July 2, 1993, after being nominated by President Clinton May 14, 1993, and confirmed by the Senate July 1, 1993.
Dr. Lee brings to his new post more than four decades of involvement in health care and public health policy --including a previous stint in the assistant secretary position.
Twenty-eight years ago (November 1965), Dr. Lee was sworn in as assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs under President Johnson. In his first two years as assistant secretary, from 1965 to 1967, Congress enacted more health legislation than all the previous Congresses put together. Not since that period has the public's health and health care reform been such a high priority on the nation's agenda.
Among his activities as assistant secretary in the 1960s, Dr. Lee helped fashion health manpower, family planning, health care, consumer protection, environmental health and biomedical research policies.
Before his first appointment to the top Public Health Service role, Dr. Lee served as director of health services in the Agency for International Development. Prior to his government service, he was a staff member at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic in California, and before that a fellow at the Mayo Clinic and Bellevue Medical Center. Dr. Lee's clinical experience enhances his commitment to public health policy and improving both care and access to care.
Dr. Lee has served with distinction as director of the Institute of Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco, for the past 21 years. In these years, he has, as a colleague recently said, worked with and influenced hundreds of health care policymakers and researchers, many of whom name Dr. Lee as their mentor. Since 1969, Dr. Lee has been a professor of social medicine at UCSF.
Dr. Lee has frequently advised federal and state health groups, and served on numerous advisory boards and planning committees. In 1985, then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein named him as the first president of the city's Health Commission, which was the governing body in the city/county health department that included public health, mental health and substance abuse services, as well as the San Francisco General Hospital (the major AIDS care facility in the city), and a 1,000-bed long-term care facility.
In 1986, when Congress set up the Physician Payment Review Commission to examine reimbursement of physicians under Medicare, Dr. Lee was named to head the commission. The commission worked closely with Congress and many physician groups, consumer groups and others in shaping the physician payment reform adopted by Congress in 1989. and his confirmation as assistant secretary, Dr. Lee served on the board of trustees of several California-based organizations representing a variety of public interests: the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, Jenifer Altman Foundation, World Institute on Disability, and the Glide Foundation of the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. Also, from 1971 to 1979, Dr. Lee served on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Dr. Lee was a member of the editorial boards of the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly and of The Annals of Internal Medicine until assuming his recent Public Health Service responsibilities.
The Public Health Service includes eight agencies that lead the world in health care for the underserved, in biomedical research, in food and drug safety and in disease control. These agencies are the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Indian Health Service, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research.
Also located in the Office of the Assistant Secretary are the Office of the Surgeon General, the Office of Population Affairs, the Office of Minority Health, the Office of Women's Health, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the Office of International Health and the National AIDS Program Office.
Dr. Lee also advises and assists HHS Secretary Donna Shalala on health policy and on all health-related activities of the department. He has played an active role in the health care reform task force.
Dr. Lee received an A.B. from Stanford University in 1945, an M.D. from Stanford in 1948, an M.S. from the University of Minnesota in 1955, and an honorary Sc.D. from MacMurray College in 1967.
Dr. Lee lives in Washington, D.C. His wife, Professor Carroll Estes, also of the University of California, is a world-recognized expert in aging and long-term care policy. Dr. Lee has five children, a stepdaughter and five grandchildren.