Posted on 01/06/2009 11:52:26 AM PST by BGHater
President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer.
When reached for comment today, Gupta did not deny the account but declined to comment.
The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said. Gupta later spoke with Tom Daschle, Obama's White House health czar and nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and other advisers to the president-elect.
The Michigan-born son of Indian and Pakistani parents, Gupta has always been drawn to health policy. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of Southwest Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman.
Gupta, who hosts "House Call" on CNN, has discussed the job offer with his bosses at CBS and CNN to make sure he could be released from his contractual obligations, the sources said.
His role as journalist and physician have sometimes overlapped. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy.
(Excerpt) Read more at voices.washingtonpost.com ...
Leon Panetta is a political hack - a much worse appointment that this guy. Otherwise I wouldn’t expend an ounce of energy on this thing except for the principle of it.
Panetta at the CIA is truly disturbing, even die hards like Feinstein and Rockefeller are shaking their heads.
I guess you must have missed this:
I am surprised 0 didn’t opt for Depak Chopra.
:o /
I expect him to appoint someone qualified and if that is a doctor that means one who follows his hippocratic oath and is therefore pro-life. I have no idea if Dr. Gupta is pro-life but I am going to go out on the limb and say probably not. I’d be happy to be wrong.
Don’t forget former Clinton arshlecher Panetta for CIA chief...
I doubt it will thrill you but I can’t help you there. I’m not the keeper of the CNN vault. I know what I saw.
At this rate he very well may.
“I have seen nothing in Gupta’s background that leads me to believe he understands the problems from a management perspective.”
Good point. If you are going to go “Doctor” you’d probably be better off appointing a nuts-and-bolts general practitioner anyway.
LOL...thanks for making me laugh genuinely. Is’nt that the truth that personality is why Obama will ocuupy the White House.
But in some seriousness, Dr. Gupta has excellent communication skills and hopefully it will benefit the country.
Which has ZERO to do with his leftwing politics, his fealty to Hillary Clinton's Gov Health Care, and agreeing to work for a Marxist who has vowed socialized medicine, he is a member of the UnAmerican Democrat Party, and works for a leftwing org; CNN.
"Things are set to change in the US with the elections in full swing. Who's got the better healthcare plan among the presidential candidates? Every candidate in this election is talking about healthcare. Hillary Clinton has been talking about universal healthcare since 1994. Barack Obama has talked about some universal healthcare insurance. Hopefully this will translate into something significant."
"What do you think of Canada's healthcare system? There are a lot of plusses to Canada's healthcare system. The biggest plus -- besides the fact that people have healthcare insurance -- is that there's a certain amount of psychological well-being, feeling safe just from knowing that you're going to be taken care of if something bad happens to you. Unfortunately, in the US people don't have that"
This is a good indicator of where Dr. Gupta stands on healthcare.
The idea is that BO is reaching backward.....into crazy places..... to move forward....;)
And yet I’ll bet you would expect a conservative to impose a litmus test!!! If a Republican had appointed someone pro-choice you would have had a fit.
Yet you expect it of the other party.
Let’s just say you’re being unreasonable and not applying principles fairly.
Being pro-life is not a litmus test. For a doctor to be pro-life is called following his hippocratic oath. For a person to be pro-life is natural and normal. Life is the fundamental right. Without it there are no other rights to be exercised. The burden of proof is not on the cause of life. Therefore it is not a litmus test.
In other words I do not give abortion a free pass because the appointer is a Democrat, just as I do not give wreckless universal health care a pass because the appointer is a Democrat. Wrong policies are wrong policies whether initiated by a Democrat or a Republican.
The ministry of propaganda is being filled as one would expect. There is no reason to expect that any substance would come from an administration that has no substance at the top.
We need to watch our elected representatives. Those who provide an impediment on our road to socialism should be rewarded. The others need to be removed.
I find comforting that the Left is accusing him of being aligned with “big pharma”.
Can't have that! How better for Zero to enforce the vegetarian part of socialism than a shepherd the sheeple have already been following?
If the Hildebeest and Bubba had Marcus Welby to promote socialized medicine, they might have gotten their way on it. Perhaps that's Barry's plan, too.
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