Adrian Campbell, the Hartland, Mich., woman whose efforts to provide health care to her young daughter were featured in Michael Moore’s documentary “SiCKO,” says that CNN neurosurgeon/reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta, President-elect Barack Obama’s reported pick for surgeon general, is the wrong person to lead the nation’s health services.

“He made fun of me for going to Canada,” said Campbell, who is seen in the film taking her daughter Aurora to Windsor, Ontario, to obtain treatment for an ear infection.

Obama’s plan to name Gupta as the government’s top medical official has prompted criticism from U.S. Rep. John Conyers, R-Mich., and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Gupta, a native of Detroit, is a practicing neurosurgeon in Atlanta, as well as a television reporter. Campbell, now a patients’ rights advocate, objected to the tenor of Gupta’s coverage of the Moore film.

On the air Gupta said: ” … In Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the United States when it came to waiting for a doctor’s appointment for a medical problem.”

“When Dr. Gupta said that Canada has longer waiting times, I felt like I was being made fun of,” Campbell told Michigan Messenger. She said that when she took Aurora to a Windsor clinic for treatment, she was seen by a doctor within 15 minutes and was treated for free.

Gupta’s comments about health care in Canada were part of what the CNN medical correspondent called a “reality check” on director Moore’s sarcastic 2007 documentary, which unfavorably compared the American health care system to those in four other countries. In July 2007 Gupta claimed that Moore had “fudged the facts” about the costs of health care in Cuba and about patient wait times and satisfaction in countries with universal health care.

Moore replied that it was Gupta who got his facts wrong and that he had inaccurately reported the “SiCKO” factual claim that Cuba pays about $251 per citizen for health care while the United States pays around $7,000. Gupta later issued a correction on this point. But he never retracted his statement about “fudged facts.” In a debate with Moore on CNN, he acknowledged that the American health care system needs improving but went to great lengths to find holes in Moore’s positive portrayal of the health care systems of Britain, France, Canada and Cuba.

For this Gupta leaned heavily on a statistic that showed that among industrialized Western countries, the United States ranked competitively with other nations when it comes to patient wait times for elective surgery. Moore pointed out that the United States performed well in this category only because a large portion of the population is excluded from waiting lists because they have no insurance. Gupta called health care “one of our most precious commodities” and questioned whether it should be “turned over to the government.”

The media watchdog group Media Matters has pointed out that Gupta, in his discussion with Moore, refused to acknowledge the Republican political contributions and insurance company ties of a “SiCKO” critic featured in his report.

Campbell said that Gupta’s attack on “SiCKO” and on universal health care systems shows that he is biased in favor of pharmaceutical and insurance companies. As heavy advertisers on CNN, such companies effectively funded Gupta’s reporting, she argued.

“We are supposed to be changing the government making it better and more trustworthy. To put somebody in there who has already blatantly lied to the American people. I think that is wrong,” she said.

Gupta’s collegaues at Emory University referred calls for comment to CNN public relations, where CNN spokeswoman, Jennifer Dargan, said that questions about Gupta’s reporting on “SiCKO” are answered on the company Web site. She did not have an immediate response to concerns about Gupta’s fitness as surgeon general.

In a 2007 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Moore said that Gupta’s critique of “SiCKO” was not the first instance in which the doctor-turned-reporter had failed to question conventional understanding of a life-and-death issue.

“I saw Dr. Sanjay Gupta over there embedded with the troops at the beginning of the war,” Moore told Blitzer. “He and the others of you in the mainstream media refused to ask our leaders the hard questions and demand the honest answers.”

Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning columnist, referenced Gupta’s attack on “SiCKO” in The New York Times last week, saying Gupta’s appointment “is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.”

Conyers, the veteran congressman from Detroit and chair of the House Judiciary Committee has asked his Democratic colleagues to publicly oppose Gupta’s nomination.

“The severity of the current health care crisis in America requires a Surgeon General of serious stature, with deep roots in the public health community and a record of compassion towards America’s 47.5 million uninsured,” Conyers wrote last week. “In what I have read about Dr. Gupta, he seems to have given little thought to the serious problems facing our health care system.”

Since the release of “SiCKO,” Campbell and others featured in the film have joined together in the American Patients Union, an organization seeking universal health care system for the United States. Together they have traveled the country promoting a Conyers bill to expand Medicare to create a national health care system. In 2007 Campbell joined a group of mothers on a hunger strike in an effort to draw attention to the need to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. The program’s expansion was later vetoed by President George W. Bush but congressional leaders plan to revive it soon.

In November 2008, Campbell, a Democrat, lost a bid for a seat on the county commission in solidly Republican Livingston County.

Gupta, 39, is a practicing neurosurgeon at Grady Memorial Hospital and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. He grew up in suburban Detroit, was educated at the University of Michigan and served as a White House fellow during the Clinton administration.

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.,told The Atlanta Journal Constitution that he would support a Gupta appointment and does not foresee much opposition in the Senate.

“He’s one of the best communicators on the subject of health I’ve ever seen,” Isakson said.