Pearson carries banner for single-payer plan

As a young doctor, Glenn Pearson cast his lot with a so-called managed-care system that by the end of the 1980s had emerged as the dominant health-care finance mechanism in America.

Two decades later, he is waging a campaign to dismantle it, and replace it with a tax-funded national health plan. For his long hours of work in support of the grassroots movement toward a single-payer health plan, Pearson is the 2007 Health-Care Hero Award winner in the volunteer category.

“I became a physician in 1982, and by the late 1980s I realized that huge numbers of people I was trying to…