Bad Medicine

We already know that the Bush Administration values politics above all else - war, peace, common decency, etc. But something about Dr. Richard Carmona's Congressional testimony on Tuesday struck a nerve.

Maybe it was that when he was Surgeon General he was directed not to say anything about the dangers of second-hand smoke. Or that he was gagged about health care in prisons. Or that he was told to stress abstinence-only sex education while ignoring the numerous studies which say it just doesn't work.

Maybe it's the simple crassness of being transformed into yet another mindless White House cheer-bot, ordered to mention President Bush no fewer than three times on every page of every speech he made. (At a press gaggle the next day, Tony Snow blithely said that "if you, in fact, serve at the pleasure of the President, you have some obligation to share his policies.")

No, I think the disgusting nadir was being "discouraged" from attending a Special Olympics event. Who could possibly have anything against helping disabled kids? The Bush Administration does, apparently - and for no other reason than the group was started and run by the Kennedy family. "I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?'" Carmona said.

And yet he was "encouraged" to travel around the country speaking at various GOP events.

This is more than simple pettiness. This is actively politicizing every function of government, even something as supposedly above politics as health care.

And it's only getting worse. The White House's nominee for the new Surgeon General, Dr. James Holsinger, is not an advocate of better health care for everyone. Rather, he's an anti-gay partisan who in 1991 wrote a scary-sounding but badly-grounded report for the United Methodist Church. Titled "Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality," he claimed that gay sex was inherently dangerous and should not be tolerated within the church.

Enough is enough. As Carmona testified on Tuesday, "the job of the Surgeon General is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party." It's high time to get politics out of health care.