Obama Asks Prominent TV Doctor Gupta To Be Surgeon General

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Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 07 Jan 2009 - 1:00 PDT

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US President elect Barack Obama has asked prominent TV surgeon Dr Sanjay Gupta to accompany him to the White House and take up the post of Surgeon General when the new administration takes over later this month. According to media reports, Gupta wants the job and is likely to take it. The post oversees the US Public Health Service comprising 6,000 Commissioned Corps members.

It appears that visibility and communication skills are important factors in Obama's choice for Surgeon General. For not only is 39-year old Gupta a practising neurosurgeon (he is a faculty member at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta and practices neurosurgery at Emory University Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital), he works for CBS News and CNN. He has interrrupted a TV show to attend an emergency operation and has travelled across America doing a series called "Fit Nation" on the dangers of obesity. He is also described as one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive".

Gupta has also been offered a post with the White House Office of Health Reform, giving him a dual role that the Washington Post earlier today said could "make him the most influential surgeon general in history".

According to the Post, who reached Gupta yesterday, he did not deny that he planned to accept the post but made no comment.

Gupta has been at the White House before; in 1997 he was appointed as one of 15 White House advisers and wrote speeches and helped draft policy for then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

According to the Associated Press, Gupta's parents moved to the US from India in the 1960s to work for Ford. He grew up in Detroit and went to Michigan University.

In 2001 he became a health correspondent at CNN and since 2006 he has had a contract with CBS News to cover health issues on the Evening News.

While covering a story for CNN in Iraq in 2003, Gupta performed emergency brain surgery on a 2 year old Iraqi boy who was shot by US Marines when the car he was in did not stop at a checkpoint. The boy died. At the time Gupta told the Associated Press that "medically and morally" the surgery was the right thing to do, it was a "heroic" attempt to save a child's life, it was not an elective operation.

In 2007 Gupta criticized Michael Moore's documentary on the US health care system, saying that Moore had not got the facts straight. There was an angry on-air confrontation between them with Moore suggesting he would be less trusting of what he saw on CNN from now on.

According to the Washington Post, Obama's transition officials won't to speak on the record about Gupta's selection, but several Obama allies have praised Gupta because he is articulate and highly visible, reminiscent of "the nation's doctor" C Everett Koop from Reagan's administration, and others before him.

CBS News President Sean McManus speaks of Gupta as an "amazing" communicator. He puts complicated medical issues into everyday language that people can understand, he said, describing Gupta as very "likeable", and he "has the ultimate credibility in that he is literally a brain surgeon," said an Associated Press report.

However, a senior publich health official told the Washington Post that Gupta faces a "credibility gap" because he has never been a member of the uniformed Public Health Service. Executive director of the service's Commissioned Officers Association, Gerard M. Farrell told the Post that he was not aware of Gupta having any public health experience or qualifications.

Appointing Gupta as leader of the nation's public health service was "akin to appointing the Army chief of staff from the city council of Hoboken", said Farrell.

The Washington Post suggests the Obama administration is gearing up to a massive reorganization of the US health system and for that they need a skilled television personality to push home the message. They have already started a grass roots campaign for changes to legislation, with over 8,500 local meetings taking place over the holidays; some of which can be viewed on the transition website.

Susan Blumenthal, who was assistant surgeon general until two years ago and has served 20 years in the Public Health Service said picking Gupta suggests a return to a "communicator model".

Gupta may also need other survival skills; the last surgeon general, Richard H Carmona, said, that to survive a job at the White House, you need two dogs because "one of them will turn on you". Carmona, a Vietnam War veteran, accused the Bush administration of making him suppress important public health information because it conflicted with White House views, said the Washington Post.

Sources: Washington Post, Associated Press.

Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
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