As Holly mentioned over in The Gaggle, President Obama has selected Dr. Regina Benjamin, founder and CEO of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., as his pick for surgeon general. From The Washington Post, in an article written before today's late-morning announcement.
President Obama has chosen Regina Benjamin, a family physician from Alabama, to be the next Surgeon General, filling a key public health post ahead of an expected surge in the H1N1 flu next fall, White House sources said.
Benjamin gained fame through her public efforts to rebuild her rural health clinic after Hurricane Katrina devastated it. She founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in 1990 and rebuilt it after the hurricane.
Benjamin has also served as the first black woman to head the State of Alabama Medical Association and was associate dean for rural health at the University of South Alabama's College of Medicine.
In her address in the Rose Garden this morning, Benjamin expressed her desire to be "America's family doctor." The MacArthur Foundation—where Benjamin was a 2008 "genius"—describes her as "a rural family physician forging an inspiring model of compassionate
and effective medical care in one of the most underserved regions of
the United States."
Which, if you ask me, sounds a lot better than "television personality who sometimes gets things wrong." (Said with all the due respect of a health blogger who sometimes gets things wrong.)
The foundation also mentions that Benjamin is a proponent of preventative care—e.g., eating right, exercise, childhood nutrition—as a way to decrease overall health-care costs and improve the lives of her patients. The shift from treating ill patients to preventing illness in healthy people is one that the medical community is just starting to embrace, and having the nation's top doc be an advocate for early preventive medicine will surely help speed up the process.
As noted by a 2008 profile in U.S. News & World Report, which named her one of the nation's best leaders, she’s also a pretty savvy politician herself (one must be, when one has to keep a free clinic open with very little financing), so it will be interesting to see how she uses this promotion to advocate for her passions. Given that her main passion seems to be affordable health care for everyone, her choice that makes a lot of sense, considering Obama's drive to get a public-health-care funding bill passed by August.
Check out this profile of Benjamin in Reader's Digest, written after she rebuilt the clinic destroyed by Hurricane Katrina:
Dr. Regina Benjamin, 49, had laid out $800 to open her family-practice clinic in this impoverished community in 1990, and many thousands more to keep it going. If people couldn't pay -- and many couldn't -- she treated them for free. Clearly, she wasn't in it for the money. But now her head swirled as she stared into the ruins of her life's dream. Then she steeled herself: I can be sad and depressed later.
After a first, frenzied, cursory collection of and scanning through links, we think she sounds pretty rad. But as we learn more—and when the inevitable backlash arrives—we'll be sure to follow up.
