Public Health Wonk Slams Sanjay Gupta For Surgeon-General

Vicente Navarro, a professor of Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services wrote on CounterPunch.org yesterday that Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent, is a lousy choice for Surgeon-General and that President Barack Obama should look elsewhere for a better choice. I agree. As I wrote last month, Gupta has struck me as little more than a journalistic lightweight, a shill for Big Pharma, and someone who's had his facts wrong on anti-depressants and children, to cite one example. And to cite two others, Gupta pimped for Gardasil and downplayed the risks of Vioxx, the latter an issue on which he was clearly very wrong.

The President has not yet formally nominated Gupta (the President is apparently otherwise occupied) and things have been quiet on the S-G nominee front lately but one assumes this will all rise to the surface again soon enough. Hopefully, we can all avoid another income tax ruckus with this likely-nominee.

After criticizing the role CNN and other news organizations played in the run-up to the Iraq War, Navarro drops this:

"It is the war carried out by forces in the U.S. that, in defense of their interests, fight to prevent the establishment of one of the basic human rights: access to medical care in time of need – a right, found in all other developed countries but still denied to the citizenry of the U.S. sixty years after President Truman tried to establish it. As a consequence of this, many thousands of people die in the U.S. each year – from 18,000 to more than 100,000, depending on how one defines preventable death – due to lack of medical care. Even if we take the lower figure of 18,000 (given by the conservative Institute of Medicine), this is six times the number of people killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. That event outraged the entire nation (as, indeed, it should), but the death toll due to lack of medical care seems to go unnoticed. These deaths are not reported on the front pages (or any other pages) of the mainstream newspapers."

What Navarro seems to forget is that because of very strict privacy laws enacted under HIPPA, it's extremely difficult for the media to report on these deaths and I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim that the media is ignoring death in plain sight. Reporters' hands are pretty much tied unless family members reach out to us and tell all.

Be that as it may, Navarro's point about Gupta being a poor choice for Surgeon-General due to his apparent opposition to a single-payer health insurance system is well-taken. From where I sit, I'm not sure that I care who winds up running whatever newfangled health insurance system we get under the Obama Administration as long as we get something that works and that is affordable and accessible to all. It would be nice, as well, if it didn't reward the same health insurance companies and pharma companies who've helped to get us into our current mess of wildly expensive health care and 47 million Americans without some kind of health coverage. As one of those 47 million Americans, I'm kind of sick of the situation.

I agree with Navarro that Gupta hardly seems an apt choice to help draw up a new health care system, although one assumes that HHS will have a bigger hand in shaping what winds up going before Congress than will the US Public Health Service.

Just as a reminder, the Sanjay Gupta under discussion here is not the same as the Sanjay Gupta who is a psychiatrist at the University of Buffalo (and also has some odd lapses on the anti-depressant front and whose conflicts of interest went unreported by the New York Times when it interviewed him in 2007).