February 28, 2011
Dr. Richard F. Daines, Former State Health Chief, Dies at 60
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Dr. Richard F. Daines, a former New York state health commissioner who espoused politically risky public health initiatives like closing hospitals and banning the use of food stamps to buy soda, died on Saturday at his family farm in Stanfordville, N.Y., in Dutchess County. He was 60.

The death was confirmed by his former press secretary, Claudia Hutton.

Dr. Daines was found by the State Police in a barn on his property, where he had been taking down Christmas decorations, Ms. Hutton said. He had been in good health and appeared to have died of a heart attack or stroke, she added.

Dr. Daines was an unconventional choice when he was appointed health commissioner in 2007 by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. He was a Republican in a Democratic administration, and he came from the world of hospital practice rather than public policy.

In his first year in office, Dr. Daines rejected millions of dollars in federal grants for abstinence-only sex education, saying that he believed it did not work.

During his tenure he oversaw the consolidation and closing of hospitals and nursing homes across the state, as recommended by a state commission.

He also lobbied aggressively, though unsuccessfully, for a tax on soda and other sugary drinks, at one point recording a YouTube video, called “Soda vs. Milk,” in which he appeared in his shirtsleeves in a kitchen to argue that rising soda consumption caused obesity.

Last October, Dr. Daines and Dr. Thomas Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, asked the federal government to let the city experiment with a prohibition on using food stamps to buy soda; the request is pending.

Explaining, in an interview last year, his advocacy of a soda tax, Dr. Daines said, “We underprice this commodity that we overconsume — and I mean we, we all do it — we suffer the consequences, and then we try to buy our way back out of it, liposuction or something, bariatric surgery, some kind of pill for obesity.”

Dr. Daines fit the part of the sin-tax crusader. Standing 6-foot-1, he was lanky and folksy, a former Mormon missionary in Bolivia and a Sunday school teacher.

In 2009, he angered health care workers by ordering them to get flu vaccinations to prevent the spread of swine flu. Three nurses challenged the order in court, and Dr. Daines later relented because of a shortage of H1N1 vaccine.

Richard Frederick Daines, the son of an anesthesiologist and a homemaker, was born in Preston, Idaho, on Feb. 17, 1951, the third of five children of Newel and Jean Daines. He grew up in Logan, Utah, where his father served two terms as mayor and where he met Linda Skidmore, his wife of 36 years.

He received his medical degree from Cornell in 1978 and worked at St. Barnabas Hospital in the South Bronx during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics, and at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, where he became president and chief executive in 2002.

He is survived by his wife, a managing director at Goldman Sachs; his parents; his children, William, Katherine and Andrew; two sisters, Pamela Johnson and Janet Stowell; two brothers, George and Peter; and a grandchild.

His term as health commissioner ended Dec. 31 as a new governor, Andrew M. Cuomo took office, and Dr. Daines accepted an appointment as a visiting scholar at the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan.

Long after Dr. Daines’s sons were too old for the Boy Scouts, Dr. Daines, a former Eagle Scout himself, still invited members of Troop 525, from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, to his farm in Stanfordville, Bill Butler, the troop’s scoutmaster, said.

“Even in the dead of winter we would go up there, and he would be the most gracious host,” Mr. Butler said. “He would have a fire blazing within minutes.”

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