Dr. Nancy Neilsen is not the first woman president of the American Medical Association but there's a darn good chance she is the first AMA president who at one point had no health insurance for the first three of her five kids, and accepted diapers and free samples of antibiotics from a generous pediatrician.

That was back in the 1960s, when she was a microbiology graduate student, the Chicago Tribune reports. She has also been a primary care physician, an associate dean at a medical school and a health insurance executive. She has seen contemporary U.S. medicine from an unusual number of angles, and at her inaugural speech at the recent AMA annual meeting in Chicago, she put covering the uninsured as the top priority. She declared she would use "all of the power" she has at the helm of the nation's biggest doctors' group "to let the nation know that we must cover America's uninsured."

"Her background allows her to speak the language of every physician in the country," Dr. Robert Goldberg, a fellow AMA member and friend of Nielsen's from the New York State Medical Society, told the Chicago paper. 

We aren't sure exactly how next year's health reform debates will play out in Washington; we know there will be many domestic and foreign policy challenges facing the next president, whoever he may be. We look forward to hearing the AMA's voice loud and clear, keeping attention focused on the families, like Neilsen's 40 years ago, who need more from our health care system than the kindest of pediatricians can provide.