US President Barack Obama on Monday named rural southern doctor Regina Benjamin as his pick to be the country’s surgeon general.
“I am honored and I am humbled to be nominated to serve… this is a physician’s dream,” the Alabama doctor said after being introduced by Obama in the White House Rose Garden as his choice for the post, which oversees 6,000 staff charged with informing US citizens about questions of health.
Benjamin, who chairs the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, has been lauded in recent years for her dogged determination in overcoming repeated disasters to run her rural clinic on the hurricane-battered Gulf coast.
The Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, which she founded, has been repeatedly hit by massive storms, most recently in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.
In accepting the nomination, Benjamin pledged to be “a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s healthcare,” as she thanked Obama for putting healthcare reform at the head of his domestic agenda.
“As a nation, we have reached a sobering realization: Our healthcare system simply cannot continue on the path that we’re on,” Benjamin said, lamenting the millions of Americans without health insurance. She also said that if confirmed by the US Senate, she wanted to use her role as surgeon general to “ensure that no one — no one — falls through the cracks as we improve our healthcare system.”
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Happy to see black women making an impact
What about scripted objects? ,
Why there is so much of confusion in your resume? ,