Supporting George Lundberg as Surgeon General

TO: President Barack Obama

PURPOSE: To support the nomination of Dr. George Lundberg as US Surgeon General

RATIONALE: America needs a surgeon general with the gravitas, experience, and moral credentials to serve as the people’s champion in the public health arena

We urge you, President Obama, to nominate George D. Lundberg, MD, MASCP as the Surgeon General who can make a difference from the bottom up; starting with moral imperatives and building a superstructure that refocuses the power of US healthcare to achieve a responsible global perspective while taking care of the people at home.

Dr. Lundberg is a Board Certified pathologist who served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for 17 years. He served in the US army during the Vietnam War in San Francisco and El Paso, leaving as a lieutenant colonel after 11 years. Dr. Lundberg was Professor of Pathology and Associate Director of Laboratories at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center for 10 years, and for five years was Professor and Chair of Pathology at the University of California-Davis. From 1999-2009 he was Editor in Chief of Medscape General Medicine (MedGenMed; The Medscape Journal), an open access, free online medical journal. For a brief bio go to: http://www.medscape.com/pages/public/bios/bio-georgelundberg

Dr. Lundberg’s platform is built on three simple truths:

1) Basic healthcare for all Americans is a moral imperative.

It is immoral and demeaning for the wealthiest nation in the world to have 47 million Americans (greater than 15%) without some level of basic health insurance. All the scientific breakthroughs that bio-medicine has to offer will not remove this current stain upon our national psyche and embarrassment on the international stage

2) We must re-establish trust in our public health system and its institutions.

Serious erosion of public trust has occurred regarding federal agencies legally charged with the mandate to protect our public health. American consumers don’t know who or what to believe because of conflicting information coming from the FDA, the CDC, the EPA, and OSHA. Our next Surgeon General must be a major player in this rebuilding process.

3) The current medical marketplace is unethical and has lead to gross excesses that are not in the public interest.

While the uninsured often lack the most basic medical care, the insured are in danger of receiving too many potentially dangerous drugs and diagnostic procedures. Our next US Surgeon General needs to put the brakes on the excesses of modern medicine that contribute to a profit model in spite of evidence that they are not working and/or are not safe.