The Daily Background

The Washington Post today has a report about how a political aide with no medical experience in the Bush Administration went out of his way to block a report by (now former) Surgeon General Richard Carmona which said that the United States needed to step up to the plate on helping other countries with global health problems.

Carmona, you’ll recall, is the recently-departed Surgeon General who made quite a stir earlier this month when he made startling allegations that the Administration had stifled health reports and censored what he had to say on health issues for political reasons (watch the above YouTube video for some background). Carmona mentioned this 2006 report that was killed by the Bush Administration in his outcry earlier, but until now no news organization had gotten ahold of a copy of it.

Here’s the Washington Post reporting on these latest developments in the political manipulation of public health reports:

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was “called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, ‘You don’t get it.’ ” He said a senior official told him that “this will be a political document, or it will not be released.”

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials. Carmona engaged in similar fights over other public health reports, including an unpublished report on prison health. A few days before the end of his term as the nation’s senior medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.
[…]
Three people involved in the preparation of an initial draft in 2005 said it received largely positive reviews from global health experts both inside and outside the government, prompting wide optimism that the report would be publicly released that year.

Said Carmona, “I refused to release it [with the requested changes] . . . because it would tarnish the office of the surgeon general when our colleagues saw us taking a political stand.” Good for him. The nation’s top health doctor shouldn’t be forced into a state where they’re politicized: they should work making people healthier.

Bush has now nominated a hyper-political homophobic doctor, James Holsinger, who thinks that homosexuality is a lethal disease which needs to be cured. The American Public Health Association has said that Holsinger has “put his political and religious ideology before established medical science.”

Holsinger also oversaw substandard care at the Veteran’s Administration.

You can email the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) at help_comments@help.senate.gov and tell them to reject Holsinger in favor of a truly nonpolitical surgeon general. Bush has plenty of good, qualified choices, but he made a mistake in choosing this guy.

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