HEALTH CARE: The Choice for Surgeon General

I was at a conference yesterday and couldn't post about President Obama's nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin to be surgeon general. Today I'm reposting what I wrote last September when she won a MacArthur "genius" grant,"

I met Dr. Regina Benjamin only once but she's not easy to forget. She took the time to travel to Missisippi in the spring of 2007, about 18 months after Hurricane Katrina, to talk to a small group of health care journalists. We weren't writing about her that day, we were just learning from her, and she was fine with that. Dr. Benjamin is a family physician in the tiny shrimping community of Bayou La Batre in southernmost Alabama. It is racially and ethnically mixed, including an influx of Vietnamese who were drawn to its shrimping fleet, probably the only thing in the fictional home of Forest Gump that was familiar to them...

News articles about Dr. Benjamin's award point out that her clinic was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but she rebuilt it -- only to have it burn down just as they were ready to reopen. What the articles omitted is that she had to rebuild as well less than a decade earlier, after Hurricane Georges in 1998. Each time, the grateful community rallied around to help her, as she has helped them, putting the bills on her own credit card when she had no other choice. When her clinic is out of commission, she treats patients out of her beat up old pick-up truck (if this sounds like a story of inspiration ready for Readers' Digest, you're right.) She also finds time to serve on all sorts of health-related and nonprofit boards, and in her "spare" time, she mentors and teaches younger doctors how to provide quality care to underserved communities in rural America.

Her job, in short, is to help us be fitter, healthier, more health-literate nation. Reducing health disparities is another priority of the U.S. Public Health Service, and emergency response is also part of their brief. In case you are wondering whether her background, however inspiring, is the right administrative fit -- she also has an MBA from Tulane.