It's been 20 years since Dr. Jack Lewin held the post of Hawaiʻi health director.
He spent almost 10 years in the position, during which time he worked with then-Gov. John Waiheʻe to expand health insurance to all Hawaiʻi residents.
He recently served as chair of the National Coalition on Health Care in Washington, D.C. But he has returned home to Hawaiʻi with a mission to help overhaul health care.
For the past year, Lewin has been quietly working as the administrator of the State Health Planning and Development Agency, which he said has not reached its full potential.
"It's actually a dream job for me," he said. "Gov. Green likes to remember the idea that back around 1990, we were 'Hawaiʻi, the health state,' according to how the rest of the country saw us. And we're going to recapture that vision again."
Lewin said the biggest problem facing Hawaiʻi is the health care worker shortage.
"The reason is that even if we're paying mainland rates for employees, the cost of living and the cost of housing in Hawaiʻi are so severe that in fact, we pay nurses, you know, equivalent to California, but they're 50th in the nation in terms of their actual purchasing power, when you look at cost of living. So we have got to deal with that," he said.
He said the state is short about 1,000 doctors and 3,000 nurses.
"We also need to get the federal government to understand they're paying us one-third less per patient in Medicare than the rest of the country, and they're paying doctors one-third less than they pay in most states," Lewin told HPR.
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 28, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
