Obama Picks ‘Country Doctor’ as Surgeon General

Posted on Jul 13, 2009

AP / Charles Dharapak

Golf claps all around: President Barack Obama applauds his nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Regina Benjamin, in the Rose Garden of the White House on Monday.

If she is approved by the Senate, Dr. Regina Benjamin has a big job ahead of her as the next surgeon general during a time of upheaval in the health care industry. Luckily, given her résumé, she seems more than qualified for the position.

AP via Google News:

President Barack 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.

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