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DJP Update 6-27-2007: AMA Annual Meeting elections;
Lagniappe-
Louisiana article: Hope Floats on the Bayou
ITEM ONE: AMA Annual Meeting elections
Elections for the AMA Board of Trustees and AMA Councils takes place at the
Annual Meeting in June in Chicago. The House of Delegates does the voting.
Multiple interviews and speeches. Very democratic.
When the House of Delegates ends, the new Board then meets and elects a
Chair-elect and a Secretary.
The meeting ended today and when the new board met they elected:
Joseph M. Heyman, MD, Ob-Gyn physician from Amesbury, Massachusetts as the
Chair-elect.
William A. Hazel, Jr, MD, from Oakton, Virginia as the Secretary.
The House of Delegates elected the following:
Nancy Nielsen, MD, PhD, an internist from Buffalo, N.Y., was elected AMA
president-elect.
Edward L. Langston, MD, a family physician (also trained as a pharmacist)
re-elected to the AMA Board, begins term as AMA Board Chair.
Jeremy A. Lazarus, MD, Denver, Colorado psychiatrist, elected speaker, AMA
House of Delegates.
Rebecca J. Patchin, MD, anesthesiologist from Riverside,
California, re-elected to 2nd four-year term on the AMA Board of Trustees.
Cyril M. "Kim" Hetsko, MD, internist from Madison, Wisconsin, re-elected to
2nd four-year term on the AMA Board of Trustees.
William A. Dolan, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon from Rochester, New York, was
elected to a four-year term on the AMA Board of Trustees.
Chris Derienzo, Duke medical student, re-elected to AMA Board of Trustees.
Andrew William Gurman, MD, orthopaedic surgeon from central Pennsylvania.,
elected vice speaker of the AMA House of Delegates.
Samantha L. Rosman, MD, a third-year resident in pediatrics in Boston,
Massachusetts, has been re-elected as the resident trustee on the AMA Board
of Trustees .
Of course, the president-elect, Ronald M. Davis, MD, a preventive medicine
physician, from East Lansing, Michigan, was installed as the new AMA
President at the 162nd Presidential Inauguration June 26.
Visit the AMA website for more information about council elections and more.
To see AMA press releases covering some of the items debated at the AMA
Annual Meeting, go to:
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/1578.html
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Pay-For-Performance was a hot topic of debate at the AMA meeting and that
topic deserves a separate DJP Update. More later.
LAGNIAPPE:
Louisiana citizens yearn for leadership, in my opinion. Below is reason for
hope after the November, 2007 Governor election.
The following excerpt deals with a candidate for Louisiana Governor, Bobby
Jindal. I have known him for many years. He is bright and a leader.
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Hope Floats on the Bayou: Bobby Jindal to the rescue Quin Hillyer, The
American Spectator July/August 2007
…
Jindal’s statewide approval ratings are consistently in the 60s. The two
most dangerous potential Democratic opponents, Breaux and Lt. Gov. Mitch
Landrieu, declined to enter the race. As of early May, Jindal (basically
rhymes with “spindle”) had some $5 million in his campaign coffers. And he
already has a resume that would be impressive for somebody twice his age.
The son of immigrants from India to Baton Rouge, Jindal got his start in
government-related work with two congressional internships in the summer of
1991, first with McCrery and then with Livingston. While with McCrery, he
volunteered to write an original proposal applying McCrery’s free-market
principles to the Medicare mess—and blew McCrery away with its quality.
McCrery soon began using Jindal’s ideas in his speeches.
Jindal had just graduated that summer from Brown University and was en route
to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He followed that up with a private sector
post for a health-care consulting firm, and already had been accepted to
both the medical and law schools of both Harvard and Yale when public policy
again attracted his attention. He briefly
met former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer and then-state Treasurer
Mary Landrieu, the two front-runners for governor in 1995, and took perhaps
more seriously than either one of them intended their respective invitations
to give them a proposal to solve the state’s Medicaid crisis.
Again, the product was superb—and it somehow made its way to aides for
then-state Sen. Mike Foster, who came from nowhere to win the governor’s
race that fall. With heavy lobbying from both Livingston and McCrery, Foster
began considering Jindal for a spot at DHH. But Jindal said he wasn’t
interested in the number two spot in the department, and went back to his
private sector job. Another call came: Would he go meet with the
governor-elect in person? The meeting
went well. Foster gave him the job, and Jindal succeeded in reforming the
Medicaid program.
From there, he went on to serve as executive director of the National
Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare (co-chaired by Breaux),
president of the University of Louisiana System, and assistant secretary of
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. By 2003, Foster’s two
terms were ending, and Jindal began a long-shot bid for governor. Several
other high-profile Republicans were in the race, and Jindal’s name ID and
poll numbers were both fairly low, but Foster and Livingston both decided to
endorse him.
“I liked him, number one,” Livingston explained this spring. “I had become
convinced that he really was extraordinarily bright and had proven himself
to be extraordinarily capable… He just had proven that despite his youth
that he could do just about any job assigned to him. I guess I wasn’t
thinking politically. I just was convinced that he had incredible abilities
and could lead Louisiana forward… I think I made the right choice.”
…
McCrery, who has supported him every step of the way, elaborated: “Bobby
has the most important quality to be successful as a political candidate: He
has that fire in the belly. He really wants to serve. He presents the sense
that he can make things better for people by serving in public office.”
In person, though, what first strikes a visitor is less a fire than an
almost irrepressible enthusiasm. Any question is answered with a torrent of
words, rapid fire—almost frustratingly so for an interviewer who wants to
discuss a long list of topics. But what emerges is so
Chevrolet-and-apple-pie-ish as to seem almost hokey, except that Jindal’s
sincerity is so palpable as to make the conversation leave hokey behind and
at least border on the inspirational.
For example: How did he get into discussing health care with McCrery? “I
was doing an honors thesis at the time on transmembranes, on the stochiometry
of energy lost in the cellular membrane. We were looking in brain stem
cells, we were looking in the fluid there to see if the sodium potassium
worked there the same way as it did in the rest of the body…”
Not until several minutes late can the interviewer get to ask how Jindal
moved from medicine to an interest in government. “You have to understand
that my parents came to Louisiana and my mom was a student at LSU when she
had me… and the first seven years of my life we lived in student housing.
But what we learned at home was two lessons, one the importance of getting a
good education and working hard, that if you did that there was no limit to
what you could accomplish in America, and secondly day after day my dad was
drilling into my head how lucky we were to have the opportunities around us.
Not everybody in the world had the freedoms that we did… so when it came
to politics and public policy I was very much attracted by the conservative
philosophy that says let’s not have the government smother the individual in
this, let’s not micromanage, let’s not excessively tax, let’s not confiscate
people’s private property rights, let’s not in other words create
disincentives when the best thing that we can do for people is give them the
opportunity to work and if you do that you give them a tremendous gift…”
…
But the real key to Jindal is not the energy of his conversation, but the
energy and effectiveness of his performance. What made him a virtual folk
hero in Louisiana was Jindal’s response to Hurricane Katrina, from which
crisis he was probably the only elected official to emerge with his
reputation actually enhanced. By widespread agreement, Jindal and his staff
are credited with responding to the storm in a superb manner, by organizing
or facilitating aid of all sorts, by being accessible, by cutting through
red tape (or just ignoring it) with alacrity and skill.
Characteristically, Jindal deflects much of the credit. “I had people in my
office who lost everything they owned and their first reaction was to help
other people. They didn’t view themselves as victims; their immediate
response was, all right, we have to get on the phone to help.”
Jindal tells of a moment at the state’s emergency response headquarters in
the first several hours when nothing constructive
seemed to be happening. The torrent of words comes again: “I
remember looking at my chief of staff and we had the same thoughts, that
there was no point in being here, it didn’t feel like enough decisions
were being made, so… we got in our vehicles and we started
driving throughout every point we could get to, to see what we could
bring, what do they need…”
They helicoptered to devastated St. Bernard Parish and found the sheriff:
“They were still rescuing people out of the water; he went through the list:
We need ammunition, we need cars, we need food, we need everything… We
called up people we knew at Ford Motor Company and other motor companies; we
got them to donate dozens of vehicles we could use for search and rescue.
There was a hospital on the north shore [of Lake Pontchartrain] that was
running low on medicines and
couldn’t get through the bureaucracy to get the medicines they needed so we
got a guy in Michigan we knew to donate a plane and a helicopter and we got
a guy in Shreveport to donate the medicines….”
Stories around Louisiana are legion about how Jindal’s staff was everywhere,
helping everybody, bypassing the bureaucrats, getting the job done.
“The one thing I want to emphasize,” he said, “is the tremendous generosity
of others because, while there were a lot of things we were able to
facilitate, just to be clear that there were so many people [churches,
non-profits, individual volunteers and donors, the Coast Guard]…. There are
thousands of untold stories, of American heroes that we don’t get to hear
about.”
It is no wonder that conservatives are rooting for Bobby Jindal.
The American Conservative Union gave him a perfect 100 rating in 2005; the
liberal Americans for Democratic Action just a 10. National Right to Life
gave him a 100, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council 96, the
National Federation of Independent Business 100, the Family Research Council
92 percent. But he supports working men and women, as is evidenced by
support from some of the less ideological
labor unions (International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, 75 percent).
“He gets it,” said .....
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Thanks,
Stay well,
Donald
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Donald J. Palmisano, MD, JD
Intrepid Resources / The Medical Risk Manager Company
5000 West Esplanade Ave., #432
Metairie, LA 70006
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