Conyers takes issue with Gupta as Surgeon General, blogs about it

Michigan’s Rep. John Conyers wrote a letter to his Democratic colleagues in Congress last week regarding his concerns about CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as nominee for Surgeon General under the Obama administration. According to the text of the letter excerpted by Jake Tapper at ABC News, Conyers has reservations about Gupta’s lack of experience and and qualifications for the job.

Gupta does not have a body of management experience, according to his Wikipedia profile; as Surgeon General, Gupta would have management authority over 6,000 health care professionals working in the U.S. Public Health Service. The Surgeon General typically does not have responsibility for generating health care policy, although the post is recognized as the most prominent spokesperson for health policy in the administration. Gupta’s experience at CNN as chief health correspondent may suit him for a role in policy promotion, but as a correspondent Gupta has had little management authority and experience.

In his opening comments to his colleagues, Conyers wrote,

I join in opposition with respected Noble (sic) Peace Prize award wining economist Paul Krugman, who has very serious concerns with having Dr. Gupta be the nation’s Surgeon General. (See January 6, 2009, New York Times Hosted Blog, ‘Conscience of a Liberal.’ Available at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-trouble-with-sanjay-gupta.)

in addition to his concerns about Gupta’s experience. Krugman’s beef with Gupta stems from a “fact-checking” rebuttal that CNN ran contesting filmmaker Michael Moore’s critique of America’s health care system in his movie, SiCKO. Gupta used inaccurate information believed to be prepared by CNN to question the validity of Moore’s work; the errors in CNN’s work were not fully retracted and corrected, with Gupta apologizing only for a portion of the inaccuracies.

Conyers’ perspective of this particular situation may be shaped by his standing as a member of the legal profession; as highly educated professionals operating under ethics guidelines regulated as part of their licensure, lawyers and doctors are generally held to a higher standard of care when making accusations regarding other professionals’ work product.

In both his personal blog and at progressive community blog site DailyKos, Conyers asked readers this weekend for their opinion about Gupta’s nomination.  The representative also mentioned in his blog posts Gupta’s acceptance of speaking fees in contravention to journalistic practices as an additional concern about Gupta’s integrity.

Gupta’s nomination could be reviewed by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions as early as Wednesday this week if his nomination is cleared to proceed by President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team.

Michigan Messenger will have more reporting related to this nomination.