so much better than dr. sanjay gupta

After the disaster that was the nomination of CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General (who, it was reported in the end, turned down the job in part because it didn't pay as much as being a TV personality), President Obama made his pick today: a primary care physician who has lived the social determinants of health, both professionally and personally. Dr. Regina Benjamin is the sort of doctor dedicated to her patients and who recognizes that the larger issues we face in improving our national health system extend far beyond just insurance reform and into public health and wellness. From USA Today:

President Obama turned to the Deep South for the next surgeon general, choosing a rural Alabama family physician who made headlines with fierce determination to rebuild her nonprofit medical clinic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Dr. Regina Benjamin is known along Alabama's impoverished Gulf Coast as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn't turn away patients who can't pay — even as she's had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once even fire.

"For all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome, Regina Benjamin also represents what's best about health care in America, doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients," Obama said Monday in introducing his choice for a job known as America's doctor.

[...]

Benjamin called the job "a physician's dream," and pledged to be a voice for patients in need — and to fight the preventable diseases that claim too many lives each year, including nearly her entire family.

Her father died with diabetes and high blood pressure, her only brother of HIV, her mother of lung cancer "because as a young girl, she wanted to smoke just like her twin brother could" — an uncle now on oxygen as a result, she noted.

"I cannot 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," Benjamin said. "I want to be sure that no one falls through the cracks as we improve our health care system."

[...]

Pushed by the need in her own shrimping community of Bayou La Batre, Ala., and its diverse patient mix — white, black and, increasingly immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — Benjamin, 51, has emerged as a national leader in the call to improve health disparities. She became the first black woman and the first doctor under age 40 elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees, and in 2002 became the first black woman to head a state medical society.

She's gotten good early reviews from the American Public Health Association, an important endorsement given that the Surgeon General is the operational head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, within the Department of Health and Human Services. Best of luck to her with the confirmation hearings, though I imagine she won't need luck given her history of determination and her impressive experience.