Obama Nominates (Super)Woman Surgeon General

If confirmed, Dr. Regina Benjamin, a practicing family physician at a clinic in rural Alabama that serves a small, hurricane-ravaged shrimping town where many of the residents live below the poverty line, will become the only the third officially nominated woman Surgeon General (a fourth woman served as Acting Surgeon General for a brief time).

The first African-American woman elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees, the president of the Medical Association of Alabama, a winner of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights and a papal cross from the Vatican for distinguished community service, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, Dr. Benjamin could surely find well-paid work as a doctor anywhere. But for the past 19 years, she has continued to operate the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic -- which treats patients who cannot afford to pay for health care for free -- in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, where she is the only doctor in town.

In fact, after Hurricane George destroyed the clinic, Dr. Benjamin rebuilt it, making housecalls to patients in her pickup truck until the clinic could reopen. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed her clinic, again, Dr. Benjamin rebuilt it again, mortgaging her house and using her own money to cover what donations could not. And when the clinic was destroyed a third time by fire, Dr. Benjamin rebuilt a third time.

When a woman this unstoppable, who has spent nearly two decades fighting to provide care people our broken health care system has left behind, says, "I want to ensure that no one -- no one -- falls through the cracks as we improve our health care system," I believe her. Unfortunately, the Surgeon General is the United States' top health educator not our top health policy maker. If Dr. Benjamin wants to cure the ailing United States health care system, she's going to need a lot of help from Congress. 

Then again, when it comes to persuading Congresspeople who have spent years arguing in circles over the health care crisis -- even as costs have skyrocketed, doctors have had their medical expertise overridden by insurance company bookkeepers, and more and more Americans have lost their access to quality care  --to finally make some real progress, a woman who has already bested two hurricanes may be just what the doctor ordered.