The introduction of medicare in Saskatchewan marks a dividing point in the history of the province and Canada. Before 1962, access to medical care was predicated on ability to pay and private health insurance. After 1962, access to needed medical care became a right in Saskatchewan, later extended to the rest of Canada. The battle to establish medicare was hard fought and in the front lines were community clinics, non-profit, consumer-controlled health co-operatives offering interdisciplinary primary care. Stan Rands was one of the key individuals who established and managed community clinics in Saskatchewan. Here is his story of how the medicare battle was fought by those who not only wanted to eliminate money as a barrier to care but also wanted to change the way health care was delivered. This is the inside story of a more radical vision of medicare, one that has still not been achieved in Canada.

A Rhodes scholar, Stan Rands worked as a senior civil servant in the Psychiatric Services Branch of the Department of Public Health in Saskatchewan for over a decade before becoming the first executive director of the Community Health Service (Sask) Association months after the Doctors Strike of 1962. For the next decade, he recruited new doctors who were sympathetic to the ideals of the community clinics and he struggled in favour of a physician payment system that would encourage better care for patients. In his later years, he was a university professor and community clinic board member as well as social justice activist. Stan Rands died in 1985.