GUPTA vs. MOORE….Barack Obama has nominated celebrity doctor Sanjay Gupta to be Surgeon General, and over at his place Ezra Klein has a full rundown of the smackdown between Michael Moore and Gupta after Sicko came out a couple of years ago. I remember being annoyed by this at the time, primarily by Gupta’s idiotic insistence that, no, America doesn’t spend $7,000 per person on healthcare, it spends only $6,000. Wham! Take that, Moore!
This seemed even more egregious than Gupta’s other errors, since it was a purely technical disagreement and Gupta knew perfectly well that (a) there was nothing wrong with Moore’s number and (b) it was a trivial difference anyway. Moore’s point was that we spend way more money than other countries without getting better results, and that’s beyond argument. In the end, though, I wrote it off not so much to mainstream dislike of Moore as to mainstream insistence that if you’re going to fact check something, then by God you’d better find some errors even if there aren’t any.
Gupta had a few other issues with Moore that Ezra didn’t comment on (is national healthcare “free”?, do other countries have longer waiting times than the U.S.?), and he didn’t do much better on those. Still, I guess in the end I agree with Ezra that this has been blown out of proportion:
But it’s not, as some of the e-mail has suggested, evidence that Gupa is either conservative or an opponent of universal health care. He’s read Obama’s plan. He’s coming on in a largely communications capacity. And that’ll be his role. Krugman says that the problem with Gupta’s performance was that it was another example of elites engaging in “Village” behavior. He’s right about that. But at the end of the day, if the villagers support Obama’s heath reform plan, it has a far better shot than if they don’t. That’s why Gupta’s hire is good for health reform, even if it’s not good for pundit accountability.
Surgeon General just isn’t that big a deal. Gupta will be an effective public face for healthcare, but it’s not likely he’ll have any major input into the policy end of Obama’s primary healthcare plan. It’s not worth getting too excited about.
UPDATE: Over at Kos, DrSteveB writes the brief for the opposition. The main problem is that Gupta has a long string of connections with various pharma and healthcare companies. I’m not sure how unusual this is, and I’ll wait to hear more about it before saying more. But it’s certainly something that needs to be addressed.
UPDATE 2: Oops. Turns out the long string of connections belongs to a different Sanjay Gupta. DrSteve has updated accordingly. Obviously the usual vetting is still in order, but there’s no evidence that Gupta has any inappropriate industry ties.
