Dr. Regina Benjamin has been named as President Barack Obama‘s choice for U.S. Surgeon General.
Obama called her an “outstanding candidate to be America’s leading spokesperson on issues of public health.”
Benjamin, a rural health care specialist, founded a clinic to serve the poor along Alabama’s Gulf Coast. She is the founder and chief executive officer of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, and has made a mission of treating Bayou La Batre’s poor and immigrant communities.
Growing up in Daphne, Alabama, Benjamin received her medical degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1984. She was named by U.S. News and World Report as one of America’s best leaders last year.
Calling the job “a physician’s dream,” Benjamin pledged to be a voice for patients in need, and to fight the preventable diseases that claim too many lives each year – including nearly her entire family.
Benjamin’s father died with diabetes and high blood pressure, her only brother of HIV, her mother of lung cancer “because as a young girl, she wanted to smoke just like her twin brother could” – an uncle now on oxygen as a result.
“I cannot change my family’s past. I can be a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s health care and our nation’s health,” Benjamin said. “I want to be sure that no one falls through the cracks as we improve our health care system.”