There had been two TV medical reporters, a Chicago neurologist, an Atlanta epidemiologist and a New York academic on US President Barack Obama’s list, but on Monday Obama instead chose a family doctor from a battered town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast to be the next US surgeon general.
In a Rose Garden ceremony, Dr Regina Benjamin twice had to tell Obama how to pronounce the name of the town in which she worked. It is spelled Bayou La Batre, Alabama, but locals run all three words together and say, Baylabatray. On his third try, the president still did not get it right, but Benjamin — quiet and unassuming, according to all reports — did not correct him.
In 2002, she became the president of the Alabama Medical Association, the first African-American woman to be president of a state medical society in the US. In September, she was one of 25 recipients of the US$500,000 “genius awards,” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
PHOTO: EPA
Benjamin, who is 52, completed her residency in family medicine at the Medical Center of Central Georgia. She is a graduate of Xavier University and the University of Alabama School of Medicine.
Since the job of surgeon general is largely ceremonial, the most important thing about the selection, which must be approved by the Senate, is what it tells of the president making it. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then US president George W. Bush picked a surgeon general who had served on police SWAT teams. President Bill Clinton chose an outspoken academic and then, when she got into political trouble, settled on a reserved public health official.
Obama’s signature domestic policy goal is reforming the nation’s healthcare system to make doctors more accessible to the estimated 50 million people without insurance. He picked someone who has spent her entire career tending to the poor and the uninsured, sometimes accepting pints of oysters as payment.
It was Benjamin’s willingness to sacrifice — something healthcare reform may ask of many more doctors — that Obama discussed at length on Monday.
“Regina Benjamin also represents what’s best about healthcare in America — doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients,” Obama said. “Through floods and fires and severe want, Regina Benjamin has refused to give up.”
When it was her turn to speak, Benjamin said: “It should not be this hard for doctors and other healthcare providers to care for their patients. It shouldn’t be this expensive for Americans to get health care in this country.”
Benjamin is the daughter of a maid from Alabama. The government helped pay for her medical studies in exchange for a promise to serve the poor for a few years. So she helped build a clinic in a shrimping town about 40km south of Mobile, Alabama.
When Hurricane George sent 1.5m of water surging into the clinic in 1998, she made house calls until it was rebuilt. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed the clinic again seven years later, she mortgaged her house to rebuild. And when a fire destroyed the rebuilt clinic the day before it was set to reopen, she sent out appeals across the country for aid to build again.
Bayou La Batre Mayor Stan Wright said Benjamin had driven a Toyota pickup with mud tires in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to tend to her patients wherever they lay. Wright is on the clinic’s board of directors. Its finances have been so shaky that it has not been able to pay her for years, he said.
“The clinic owes her over US$300,000,” Wright said.
Audrey Nel Bosarge, a nurse who worked side by side with Benjamin for 19 years, said Benjamin routinely made house calls to shut-ins. She has paid for medicines out of her own pocket for some who could not afford them, Bosarge said.
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