The next Surgeon General will likely be CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Gupta is a medical doctor, a neurosurgeon who has actually performed surgery as recently as 2003, when he was imbedded with a Navy medical unit and his skills were called for five times, so that much is covered. It is, of course, immediately striking that one who's claim to administrative experience is directing his intern to fetch him a coffee with skim milk.
Just kidding; I have no idea how Dr. Gupta takes his coffee, but more importantly, it's not clear that the position is much more than a spokesperson for HHS and the Administration's public health policy. Here's what the Surgeon General does:
The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the [U.S. Public Health Service], a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency[....]
The Surgeon General also has many informal duties, such as educating the American public about health issues and advocating healthy lifestyle choices.
Yes, I saw the part about being in charge of the Public Health Service, but I'm still not convinced those professionals aren't, day-to-day, run by career staff. But maybe I could say that about all departments. Truth is, I don't really know how to feel about this pick, given all the brilliant public health professionals out there. If this is a primarily spokesperson position, however, perhaps this was the right choice. On Dr. Gupta:
The Michigan-born son of parents who were born in India, Gupta has always been drawn to health policy. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of South Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman.
Gupta, who hosts "House Call" on CNN, has discussed the job offer with his bosses at CBS and CNN to make sure he could be released from his contractual obligations, the sources said.
His role as journalist and physician have sometimes overlapped. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy.
Judgment reserved, pending actually performance review.
update: The Nobel Laureate weighs in. From Paul Krugman's blog:
I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
Yeah, that is annoying.
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