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CNN's Rick Sanchez brings in Michael Moore basher Sanjay Gupta and Rep. Roy Blunt to lament the horrors of private insurance companies no longer being able to reap massive profits on the backs of United States citizens. If we did by some miracle actually ever get to universal health care in the U.S., it would not mean these companies are out of business completely. They would still be offering supplemental insurance to compliment the government plan. In the world of the Gupta's and Blunt's out there, that would be a tragedy.

Blunt goes so far as to cite Medicare Part D as an example of just how well Republican health care reform has worked with giving consumers "choices". Yeah, the "choice" to line the pharmaceutical industry's pocket.

SANCHEZ: Roy Blunt is joining us now. He is a congressman from Missouri. He is good enough to talk to us now.

Congressman, thanks for being with us. I imagine the news that you are hearing, that there are problems here in the city, are ones you would have expected. But let me start you somewhere else and ask you, OK, what would your plan be?

BLUNT: Actually, that's the interesting thing about this debate, I think, Rick, is everybody agrees on the top line issues. We believe, I believe, as the leader of our group on our side that's tried to bring our committees together to work on this, I think we are in generally broad agreement.

We need a plan that has -- we need a health care system that has access for everybody regardless of preexisting conditions, one that has more competition, more choice in a way that would make it more affordable, and one that ensures that people have the maximum opportunity to make their own choices about their doctor and their health care.

So we agree on the goals, and our biggest disagreements are how you get there. And probably the biggest disagreement of how you get there is whether the government is going to run a plan that doesn't broaden competition, but actually eventually eliminates all the competition.

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March 05, 2009 CNN

Sanjay Gupta vs. Michael Moore on the national health care system on Larry King Live, July 2007

WSJ Health Blog:

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta. He’s expected to accept the job, the Post says, citing two unnamed sources. Gupta declined the Post’s request for comment.

Besides his CNN gig, Gupta also appears on CBS and writes for Time Magazine. He was a White House Fellow and a special adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. Oh, and he’s a neurosurgeon at Emory and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

There’s a certain logic to picking a TV talking head to be surgeon general, because the surgeon general is largely a talking head. The top doc does oversee the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the real work of the job is traveling around the country, using the title as a bully pulpit to advance a public health agenda.

Of course, it would be nice if he used that bully pulpit to advocate for Universal Health Care, which would be the single best news for public health in this country, but it doesn't appear that Dr. Gupta thinks there's a problem. Paul Krugman agrees:

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.