The financial crisis and economic turmoil has many Americans and voters wondering, what's next? Lloyd Dean, the CEO of Catholic Health Care West (the country's eighth-largest hospital network) tells the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview  that: "the next financial crisis won't be what we're currently experiencing; it will be a health care crisis." Dean believes that while financial stability will eventually return to our economy, our way of delivering health care remains unsustainable. As such, Dean has been an outspoken advocate for health reform. And a key component of health reform, he said, is covering the uninsured:

I would and will continue to advocate some kind of universal health care in this country. I think that health care is a right. I don't think that it's a privilege. It is a shame that a country of our means has 46 million individuals who do not have access or have no way of paying for their health care.

Many individuals I see and talk to—and even in my own family—have to choose whether they are going to spend money on medicine or spend money on food. Am I going to split my pill in half so that I can buy oil to heat my home through the whole winter?

I have advocated forming coalitions at any level—at the federal level like we do with the Catholic Health Association of the United States, here with the Healthy San Francisco program—I believe it is in the best interest of the country that everyone has access to a minimal level of health services.

I know what it's like to not have health care. I grew up in an environment where the first physician I ever saw was in the high school physical. My father was, we like to say, the surgeon and my mother was the nurse. I come from a family of nine kids. The only time I ever visited the doctor was to join my mother one time when one of my brothers was being born.

As providers of health care, we are compelled to be as efficient as possible and we have to be part of the solution. Health care in this country is way too expensive. If we don't stop this, we won't be able to afford to pay, and that 46 million will be 75 million, and wouldn't that be a shame?

Covering those 46 million, Dean argues, is a crucial step toward reducing the uncompensated care that makes health care more expensive for all Americans. Elsewhere, Dean talks about a variety of issues, including the challenges the financial crisis has placed on his hospital system as well as the role of individual responsibility in the management of personal health. But throughout the interview, the CEO's bottom line remained the same: sustainable health reform is, and will continue to be, a top issue for all Americans.