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Obama taps African American as top doctor
2009-07-13
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President Barack Obama on Monday named rural southern doctor Regina Benjamin as his pick to be the country's surgeon general. "I am honored and I am humbled to be nominated to serve... this is a physician's dream," the Alabama doctor said after being introduced by Obama in the White House Rose Garden as his choice for the post, which oversees 6,000 staff charged with informing US citizens about questions of health. Benjamin, who chairs the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, has been lauded in recent years for her dogged determination in overcoming repeated disasters to run her rural clinic on the hurricane-battered Gulf coast. The Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, which she founded, has been repeatedly hit by massive storms, most recently in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. In accepting the nomination, Benjamin pledged to be "a voice in the movement to improve our nation's healthcare," as she thanked Obama for putting healthcare reform at the head of his domestic agenda. "As a nation, we have reached a sobering realization: Our healthcare system simply cannot continue on the path that we're on," Benjamin said, lamenting the millions of Americans without health insurance She also said that if confirmed by the US Senate, she wanted to use her role as surgeon general to "ensure that no one -- no one -- falls through the cracks as we improve our healthcare system." While the surgeon general acts as the government's chief spokesperson on health issues, they have little direct role in policy-making. Obama wants Congress to approve his healthcare reform proposals by the end of the year in order to fulfill one of his key campaign promises -- providing healthcare to the 46 million Americans, some 15 percent of the population, who currently do not have any medical coverage. Obama's healthcare plan includes a government insurance option, which has been fiercely criticized by Republicans. Providing insurance is a millstone for businesses and carves a hole in the budget of many Americans, and Obama has said it is a moral and economic imperative for his administration to push reform at a time of deep economic crisis. "The status quo on healthcare is no longer an option," Obama said on Monday before introducing Benjamin. "This country can't afford to have healthcare premiums rise three times faster than people's wages, as they did over the last decade. We can't afford 14,000 Americans losing their healthcare every single day," he said. Benjamin, who was the first African American to become the president of a US state medical society, wrote about her calling to medicine on the National Institutes of Health web site. "I believe it was divine intervention," she said about her time in medical school at the University of Alabama. It was at that point Benjamin said she realized "there was nothing else I'd rather do with my life than to be a doctor. "I had never seen a black doctor before I went to college, so I did not have an idea that I wanted to be one. I never thought that I couldn't, but I never really thought about it at all." Earlier this year high-profile CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta withdrew for consideration as Obama's surgeon general, citing family and career reasons.
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