President Obama’s pick for Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin, a general practitioner who has devoted her career to providing health care to the rural poor in Alabama, brings more than just her medical chops to the table. A graduate of Xavier and Tulane universities in New Orleans, she knows the problems Louisiana faces in health care, but more than anything else, it is her Katrina story that speaks for our collective experience.
Benjamin’s health clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., the Gulf coast shrimping community that was the fictional home of “Bubba” Blue, Forrest Gump’s comrade-in-arms in Vietnam and partner in Bubba Gump Shrimp, was destroyed first by Hurricane George in 1998, before being flooded for a second time by Katrina in 2005, and then burning down the night before the restored clinic was set to reopen. Benjamin knows all about living in shelters and FEMA trailers, losing medical records, finding ways to afford medication when her patients and her town are destitute, and rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding.
Today’s New York Times has republished a letter-to-the-editor she wrote on August 27, 2006, a year after Katrina had devastated Bayou La Batre. We know this story inside out, it’s the story of Katrina and Rita, it’s our story as well as hers.
Benjamin is eminently qualified to speak as the nation’s first doctor. But it is her particular knowledge of what a community goes through during a disaster, and how much courage it takes to rebuild a life, a community, a city, a state, that has transformed her into a physician of more than the body. Like all great doctors, she is a healer of the spirit, she knows what it takes to really make a person whole again.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again, it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to go public this year.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
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