David Jolly spent his career in public health and education and brings that experience, as well as a long-held interest in health care access, as a chapter volunteer and now board member with Maine AllCare.
David Jolly says he pinches himself to realize that he now lives in such a beautiful place—the town of Penobscot on the Blue Hill peninsula in coastal Maine. He grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and spent much of his adult life in cities, so the quiet and beauty of his adopted home are a refreshing change.
He joined the Maine AllCare board in January 2023, after volunteering with the Downeast chapter for several years. He and his husband moved full-time to Maine when David retired, in 2016, after a career in public health and teaching at the university level and in elementary education.
Health care is an issue he’s “been concerned about for decades,” he says.
His first “real job” out of college was in an experimental alcohol detox program at Cambridge Hospital outside of Boston, where he worked with people who introduced him to progressive political ideas and activism, including health care access. “That’s where I began to think about this issue—and that was 1972!” he says. The director of the program was a doctor named Bill Clark, who would later become a a central figure with Maine AllCare.
After his stint at Cambridge Hospital, David taught elementary school for several years, and later went back to graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In NC, he worked on HIV/AIDS issues in the early years of the epidemic, first on a volunteer basis, then for the state department of public health, and later at two private nonprofit organizations.
While in North Carolina David met the man who would become his husband, Royce Hardin. He and Royce came to Maine for the first time on vacation in September 1998, drawn by Acadia National Park among other spots. They fell in love with the state and began spending time in Maine during the summers, planning to eventually retire here. After spending more than half of each vacation looking for a house that worked for them, first in the Portland area and then moving up the coast, they found their house in Penobscot in 2005 and made the leap to living part-time in Maine.
Beginning in 1999, David taught for 17 years in the Department of Public Health Education at North Carolina Central University, a professional preparation program for health educators. There he developed a course on public health policy, first focused on tobacco and later on health care access after the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. He also volunteered with a grassroots group that advocated for Medicaid expansion.
He had long envisioned a national health insurance system, similar to the one in Canada, as the best solution for health care reform. In his public health policy class, they explored various models of universal health care in place around the world, from the government-run National Health System in the UK to the Bismarck model in Germany.
He asked students to answer two questions: What health care system would they prefer, and what system did they think would be most viable in the U.S.? Most students favored some form of social insurance or socialized medicine, but thought that the Bismarck model, which relies heavily on private insurance but on a nonprofit basis and with central government controls, would be most viable in the U.S.
David says he is open to any path that will get us to universal health care that’s affordable, equitable, and economically sound. He advocates for more integration between public health and health care, and his background and experience are welcome additions to the Maine AllCare board.
Since his retirement, he has been trying to find his niche and has volunteered at the Surry School and with other organizations, as well as with the Maine AllCare Downeast chapter. He successfully urged the Penobscot selectboard to pass a universal health care resolution in 2020. He sees joining the board as “a great opportunity to go deeper around this issue … to learn and also to contribute.”