We mourn the death and celebrate the life of Horace “Bud” Bernton—husband, father, physician, and co-founder of the Primary Care Coalition. Bud died on June 12, 2025, just after his 99th birthday.
Bud was a physician and a builder. His son Ned remembers a father capable of both hospital rounds and cobbling together a wood shop from spare parts. “I do sometimes wonder where this drive to build and fix things came from,” Ned says, and he attributes at least some of it to his father’s time living with a family of Pennsylvania tenant farmers in the 1930s. That year was starkly different from his well-heeled Washingtonian normal, and it stayed with Bud for a lifetime. Not just in how he went about his hobbies, but in how he practiced medical care.
Bud accepted payments from low-income patients in whatever currency of garden produce or other goods they had available. But a single physician can only see so many patients. To encourage other physicians to see patients who needed them—not simply the ones who could pay—Bud embedded quotas for serving uninsured patients into a process for new patient referrals.
Long-time friends remember Bud’s knack for surrounding himself with lovely foliage no matter how large—or limited—the acreage. Because perhaps above all, Bud was a gardener. While he certainly had a talent for understanding how things worked—be they machines or human bodies—he had a gift for understanding how things grew.
PCC was the beneficiary of Bud’s abiding passion for care and his retirement energy. “Bud knew everyone,” remembers co-founder Dr. Carol Garvey. “We would never have gotten so far, so fast” without him. Sometimes literally. When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation denied an early PCC funding application, says former board member Betsy Carrier, Bud made a road trip to the foundation’s New Jersey headquarters. He came home with a funding award. The same life lessons she learned from Bud have become an enduring part of the PCC DNA: “Healthcare is a human right, you need data to make your case, and never take no for an answer.”
“Whether he was visiting the PCC offices or stopping by my house, sending me articles, introducing me to people or organizations, or calling with an idea to hash out, Bud’s mind and heart were committed to improving access for the uninsured,” says former PCC President and CEO Leslie Graham. “Well into his 90’s, he was talking with me about blue zones, health care for immigrant farm workers and children, and partnerships for PCC to improve access.”
Bud and his wife Connie spent much of their retirement years in Florida, where family friend Kathie Stein remembers him generating saplings from a red maple tree to transplant a piece from his life to family elsewhere. He also transplanted his Montgomery County roots to his Florida home, working to replicate some PCC successes there. Tash Bernton says his father believed deeply in “doing something that benefits not simply yourself or yours but the broader community.”
“The Primary Care Coalition was always close to my father's heart,” says son Hal, “and his role in founding the coalition was one of things he was most proud of in his lifelong efforts to improve access to healthcare.”
May Bud’s memory be for a blessing. For us at PCC, it already is.
Bud was a physician and a builder. His son Ned remembers a father capable of both hospital rounds and cobbling together a wood shop from spare parts. “I do sometimes wonder where this drive to build and fix things came from,” Ned says, and he attributes at least some of it to his father’s time living with a family of Pennsylvania tenant farmers in the 1930s. That year was starkly different from his well-heeled Washingtonian normal, and it stayed with Bud for a lifetime. Not just in how he went about his hobbies, but in how he practiced medical care.
Bud accepted payments from low-income patients in whatever currency of garden produce or other goods they had available. But a single physician can only see so many patients. To encourage other physicians to see patients who needed them—not simply the ones who could pay—Bud embedded quotas for serving uninsured patients into a process for new patient referrals.
Long-time friends remember Bud’s knack for surrounding himself with lovely foliage no matter how large—or limited—the acreage. Because perhaps above all, Bud was a gardener. While he certainly had a talent for understanding how things worked—be they machines or human bodies—he had a gift for understanding how things grew.
PCC was the beneficiary of Bud’s abiding passion for care and his retirement energy. “Bud knew everyone,” remembers co-founder Dr. Carol Garvey. “We would never have gotten so far, so fast” without him. Sometimes literally. When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation denied an early PCC funding application, says former board member Betsy Carrier, Bud made a road trip to the foundation’s New Jersey headquarters. He came home with a funding award. The same life lessons she learned from Bud have become an enduring part of the PCC DNA: “Healthcare is a human right, you need data to make your case, and never take no for an answer.”
“Whether he was visiting the PCC offices or stopping by my house, sending me articles, introducing me to people or organizations, or calling with an idea to hash out, Bud’s mind and heart were committed to improving access for the uninsured,” says former PCC President and CEO Leslie Graham. “Well into his 90’s, he was talking with me about blue zones, health care for immigrant farm workers and children, and partnerships for PCC to improve access.”
Bud and his wife Connie spent much of their retirement years in Florida, where family friend Kathie Stein remembers him generating saplings from a red maple tree to transplant a piece from his life to family elsewhere. He also transplanted his Montgomery County roots to his Florida home, working to replicate some PCC successes there. Tash Bernton says his father believed deeply in “doing something that benefits not simply yourself or yours but the broader community.”
“The Primary Care Coalition was always close to my father's heart,” says son Hal, “and his role in founding the coalition was one of things he was most proud of in his lifelong efforts to improve access to healthcare.”
May Bud’s memory be for a blessing. For us at PCC, it already is.
RSS Feed