Please click here to vote by April 15, 2019.
At-large Seats (2 seats)
The at-large board member not up for election is Stephen K. Chao, MD (Texas).
Nahiris M. Bahamón Fernández, MD, FAAP (Illinois)
Dr. Nahiris Bahamón is a board-certified pediatrician at Esperanza Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) and a board adviser for Physicians for a National Health Program. She has been actively involved with PNHP since medical school as part of the Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP). She, with other residents and medical students, led the creation of Residents for a National Health Program and organized the Match Day Pledge. She is also an advocate for children and families as an active member of the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and its committees on social determinants of health and refugee and immigrant health. In her role as a physician advocate, Dr. Bahamón has provided testimony to the City of Chicago, lobbied the state legislature, led multiple demonstrations and rallies, and appeared on TV and other media.
Dr. Bahamón completed her pediatrics residency at The University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital as a LUCENT Scholar and a New Century Scholar. She graduated with honors from College of DuPage and with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She attended medical school at Boston University, where she also served as co-chair of BUMC Pride (an LGBTQ student organization) and the Community Health Project.
Born and raised in Colombia, Dr. Bahamón moved to the U.S. at age 18 as a refugee with her family.
Philip A. Verhoef, MD, PhD, FAAP, FACP (Illinois/Hawaii)
Dr. Phil Verhoef is an adult and pediatric intensivist at Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii (effective July 2019), after having been an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics working in the MICU and PICU at the University of Chicago. As a single-payer activist, he has been a national board member of PNHP, past president of the Illinois Single Payer Coalition, past president of the PNHP-IL chapter, and has been the faculty advisor for the Pritzker School of Medicine SNaHP chapter since its inception. His healthcare reform and single-payer-related publications include letters, op-eds, and editorials in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Chest, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Springfield Journal Register, and kevinmd.com.
Dr. Verhoef completed medical and graduate training at Case Western Reserve University, followed by residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at UCLA and subspecialty ICU fellowship training at the University of Chicago. He has led an NIH-funded research lab studying the immunology of sepsis in the ICU and his scientific work has been published in Nature, PNAS, AJRCCM, AJRCMB, JCI-Insight, and Journal of Immunology. Dr. Verhoef is interested in improving the care of septic patients through a precise understanding of their immune systems in response to infection, using a range of translational and “big data” methodologies.
North East Region (1 seat)
Board members in this region not up for election are Mary O’Brien, MD (New York) and Janine Petito, MD (Massachusetts).
Danny McCormick, MD, MPH (Massachusetts)
Dr. Danny McCormick is a practicing general internist, health services researcher, medical educator and activist focusing on single-payer national health insurance. In addition to practicing primary care internal medicine at the Cambridge Health Alliance, he is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Division of Social and Community Medicine in the Department of Medicine and co-director of the Harvard Medical School fellowship in general medicine and primary care. He also leads the curriculum in social medicine and research-based health activism in the internal medicine residency program at the Cambridge Health Alliance. Along with research colleagues David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, he has published numerous research articles relating to single-payer national health insurance and has used this research to advocate for a single-payer program. Dr. McCormick served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow in Washington, DC, and a staff member of U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions under Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). Dr. McCormick is currently a member of PNHP’s Board of Directors and has been a member of the Massachusetts chapter of PNHP for more than 20 years.
South Region (1 seat)
The Board member in this region not up for election is Jessica Schorr Saxe, MD (North Carolina).
Olveen Carrasquillo, MD, MPH (Florida)
Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo is professor of medicine and public health sciences and chief of the division of general internal medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He is also director of the division of health services research and policy in the Department of Public Health Sciences. He directs the community engagement and cultural diversity program of the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute and leads Florida’s only primary care research fellowship program. A national leader in primary care and health disparities, Dr. Carrasquillo has conducted extensive research on health insurance and access to care among minority and other vulnerable populations. At the Miller School, he is leading several NIH-funded randomized studies examining community-based strategies to improve healthcare among racially and ethnically diverse populations. He is currently a national board member for PNHP.
North Central Region (1 seat)
The Board member in this region not up for election is Susan Rogers, MD, FACP (Illinois).
Ann M. Settgast, MD, DTM&H (Minnesota)
Dr. Ann Settgast graduated from Creighton University School of Medicine in 1999 and completed her residency in internal medicine at the University of Minnesota. Following a chief residency year, she obtained her diploma in tropical medicine & hygiene at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She then worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) in a visceral leishmaniasis project in rural Ethiopia.
Since returning to Minnesota in 2006 Dr. Settgast has worked as a general internist, providing primary care to a foreign-born population at the Center for International Health in St. Paul and also practices in the Travel and Tropical Medicine Center there. She also spends two months per year doing inpatient hospitalist work at Regions Hospital. She is a member of the University of Minnesota’s global health faculty and holds a teaching position in the residency continuity clinic. Dr. Settgast is a past co-chair of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and a member of the national board of directors.
West Region (2 seats)
The board member in this region not up for election is Scott Goldberg, MD (California).
Stephen B. Kemble, MD (Hawaii)
Dr. Steve Kemble attended medical school at the John A. Burns School of Medicine when it was a two-year school, and completed medical school at Harvard. He trained in both internal medicine and psychiatry. Dr. Kemble is a psychiatrist in private practice and also teaches psychiatric aspects of general medical care to internal medicine residents. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor of both Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine.
Dr. Kemble is a past president of both the Hawaii Psychiatric Medical Association and the Hawaii Medical Association. He has a longstanding interest in health care reform, and he has been appointed to the Hawaii Health Authority, charged with overall health planning for the State of Hawaii and with designing a universal health care system covering everyone in the State. Dr. Kemble serves as a board adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program.
Paul Y. Song, MD (California)
Dr. Paul Song was most recently on the faculty of the Samuel Oschin Cancer Center at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and currently sees Medicaid and uninsured patients at Dignity California Hospital.
Dr. Song is the current President of Physicians for a National Health Program – California. He served as the co-chair of the Campaign for a Healthy California from 2017-2018 and was the very first visiting fellow on health care policy in the California Department of Insurance in 2013.
He is the chief operating officer/chief medical officer of NKMax America, Inc., a subsidiary of South Korean-based ATGen Global, where he oversees all translational research and clinical programs. He is also the chief medical officer of Hawkeye Bio.
Dr. Song graduated with honors from the University of Chicago and received his medical degree from George Washington University. He completed his residency in radiation oncology at the University of Chicago where he served as chief resident and completed a brachytherapy fellowship at the Institute Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France. He was also awarded an ASTRO research fellowship in 1995 for his research in radiation-inducible gene therapy.
Dr. Song serves on the national board of Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare Now, and Progressive Democrats of America.
