An African-American rural health physician who practices family medicine in the Gulf coastal area of Alabama is President Barack Obama’s choice for U.S. surgeon general.
The president announced his choice of Dr. Regina M. Benjamin as the nation’s new chief public health spokesperson at the White House on Monday.
“My hope, if confirmed as surgeon general, is to be America’s doctor, America’s family physician,” Dr. Benjamin said after the appointment was announced.
“I want to ensure that no one – no one – falls through the cracks as we improve our healthcare system.”
Obama hailed his appointee as a model of resilience, compassion and public service at a time when the American health system faces an historic crisis.
Twenty years ago, Benjamin founded the Bayou Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a diverse and very poor fishing community of 2,500 residents located about 25 miles southwest of Mobile. Many of its residents do not have health insurance.
“And like so many other rural communities, doctors and hospitals are hard to come by. And that’s why, even though she could have left the state to make more money as a specialist or as a doctor in a wealthier community, Regina Benjamin returned to Alabama and opened a small clinic,” Obama said.
“When people couldn’t pay, she didn’t charge them. When the clinic wasn’t making money, she didn’t take a salary for herself. When Hurricane George destroyed the clinic in 1998, she made house calls to all her patients while it was rebuilt. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed it again and left most of her town homeless, she mortgaged her house and maxed out her credit cards to rebuild that clinic for a second time.”
Hurricane Katrina, of course, is a vivid symbol of the callousness and ineptness of the George W. Bush administration. Obama extolled Dr. Benjamin as a new national model for responding to that storm.
“She tended to those who had been wounded in the storm, and when folks needed medicine, she asked the pharmacist to send the bill her way,” Obama said.
“And when Regina’s clinic was about to open for the third time, and a fire burned it to the ground before it could serve the first patient, well, you can guess what Dr. Benjamin did. With help from her community, she is rebuilding it again.”
Personal and public health
If the president spoke of her public service, Dr. Benjamin was very personal in her remarks to reporters, referencing several illnesses that have disproportionately ravaged the black community.
“My father died with diabetes and hypertension. My older brother, and only sibling, died at age 44 of HIV-related illness. My mother died of lung cancer, because as a young girl, she wanted to smoke just like her twin brother could,” she said.
“My Uncle Buddy, my mother’s twin, who’s one of the few surviving black World War II prisoners of war, is at home right now, on oxygen, struggling for each breath because of the years of smoking. My family is not here with me today, at least not in person, because of preventable diseases.”
She explained how these personal experiences have shaped her approach to public health.
“While I can’t change my family’s past, I can be a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s health care and our nation’s health for the future,” Benjamin said.
“And as a nation, we have reached a sobering realization: Our health care system simply cannot continue on the path that we’re on. Millions of Americans can’t afford health insurance, or they don’t have the basic health services available where they live.”
She also struck a note of public service that resonates with Obama’s message in participating in the 2009 Major League All-Star Game on Tuesday in St. Louis.
“I went back home to Alabama as part of my obligation to the National Health Service Corps. It’s a program that provides underserved communities in America with qualified clinicians,” Dr. Benjamin said.
“The National Health Service Corps paid for my medical school education, and in return placed me in an area that desperately needed physicians, and I stayed.”
She also thanked two of her professors at Morehouse School of Medicine for their influence in her career – former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, who connected her with community medicine, and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis Sullivan.
Dr. Satcher, now the Poussaint-Satcher-Cosby Chair in Mental Health at the Morehouse School of Medicine, applauded the appointment.
“She represents primary care, family medicine at its best, and commitment to underserved communities, which is rare in this country,” he said of Benjamin.
“She represents leadership in medicine. You do not think of family physicians practicing in rural underserved communities as also being national leaders.”
Dr. Benjamin said she learned leadership from Dr. Sullivan, her dean in medical school who also taught her hematology.
“More importantly, he taught me leadership,” she said of Dr. Sullivan.
“From him I learned how to impact policy at the federal, state and local levels to help our patients and to help our community.”
Dr. Benjamin also promises to offer a prominent model of rising to national leadership from roots in historically black institutions of higher learning.
She attended Xavier University of Louisiana and was in the second class at Morehouse School of Medicine. She then earned her medical degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an MBA from Tulane.
Professionally, she has served as associate dean for Rural Health at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine, where she administers the Alabama AHEC program and previously directed its Telemedicine Program.
In 1995, Dr. Benjamin became the first physician under 40 and the first African-American woman to be named to the American Medical Association’s Board of Trustees.
In 1998 she was the U.S. recipient of the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights. She became president of Alabama’s State Medical Association in 2002. She serves on numerous boards and committees, including the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Her numerous awards and recognitions include the $500,000 MacArthur Genius Award in 2008.
The surgeon general oversees the operations of the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. The office is part of the Office of Public Health and Science in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Benjamin will serve as America’s chief health educator on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury.
In March, Dr. Sanjay Gupta – reported to be Obama’s first choice for the appointment – removed his name from consideration, saying the timing was not right for his family.
