You can't call San Francisco 'sicko'

San Francisco Chronical: Ying Fei Feng waited months for Monday to arrive. She'd seen a news story on the local Chinese TV station about San Francisco attempting to become the first city in the nation to provide universal health care to its residents and made a mental note of the program's start date.

The 54-year-old set out from her home the Sunset District, rode Muni all the way across the city and walked into the lobby of North East Medical Services, a nonprofit health care center on the border of North Beach and Chinatown.

She walked past bouquets of brightly colored balloons marking the occasion and into a small office, where she waited her turn to talk to an intake worker. She had a simple question: How do I sign up for Healthy San Francisco?

"Oh, I'm very happy," she said in Cantonese. "I've wanted something like this to happen for a long time. I heard about it in April, and I've been waiting."

So have the city's elected leaders, who in a rare display of unanimity agreed last summer to begin providing health care to all San Franciscans. At a time when the broken state of the health care system is at center stage -- in the race for president in 2008 and at movie theaters where Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" is filling a lot of seats -- San Francisco is the first city in the country to try to tackle the problem itself. KEEP READING >