The trouble with Sanjay Gupta

When I heard the rumor that CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta is being considered for the job of Surgeon General, I started to worry about what this could mean for the future of health care in America.

Many of us are hoping that the Obama administration will provide health care coverage for all, and fix the problems with the current health care system that Michael Moore exposed in his movie Sicko.

And I thought about how Dr. Gupta tried so hard to discredit the claims Moore made in the movie, even though it turned out that Moore was right and Gupta was wrong.

When I sat down this morning to write about it, the first thing I came across in my research was a blog piece by New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, posted yesterday.

In it, Krugman points out the following:

So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN's Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don't have a problem with Gupta's qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don't have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore "fudged his facts", when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he's uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It's sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less "serious" than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it's a small thing, 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.

I'll go a step further and ask if Gupta's knee-jerk response to Moore, and his blatant disregard for the facts in the process, represents the kind of attitude we want at the highest levels of the medical profession in this country.

That's not change we can believe in. It's just more of the same.

For now, don't get sick if you can't afford it.