Byline: MIKE HUREWITZ Staff writer
SARATOGA SPRINGS U.S. Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders urged thegraduating class of Albany Medical College on Thursday to advocate health care as a right, not a privilege.
The outspoken Elders recalled a lawyer once demanded to know who gave citizens such a right.
``If every criminal has a right to a lawyer, why shouldn't every sick person have a right to a doctor?'' was her retort, a response which evoke cheers and applause from the audience at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
``The only group of Americans that have a constitutional right to health care,'' she added in her measured, almost evangelical cadences, ``are criminals.''
The warm reception to her 20-minute speech, punctuated about a half-dozen times by applause and ending with a standing ovation, was a marked contrast to the scene earlier near the ticket booths several hundred yards away where 60 anti-abortion protesters had gathered.
Many were carrying placards of a fetus that said, ``This Patient Also Deserves To Live.'' One had a sign, ``Joycelyn Elders The U.S. Condom General.''
Dr. Elders, a pediatrician, has been quoted as saying the anti-abortion advocates need to get over their ``love affair with the fetus.'' She has advocated condom use as part of her campaign to prevent an epidemic of unwanted teen pregnancies.
She mentioned the abortion issue only in passing, Thursday, urging only that ``every child born in America is a planned, wanted child.''
The bulk of her speech was a call to the graduates to embrace the health reform movement being pushed by the Clinton administration.
``You will be the vanguard of the new era of health care reform,'' she said, adding a little later, ``the challenges on you are great or greater than any class before you.''
The health care delivery system, she said is now really a ``sick-care'' system. It focuses on treating people after they are ill. A better approach, she said, would be to emphasize disease prevention.
The first step, she said, is recognizing that there is indeed a crisis. When 81 million people can't get health insurance and millions more are under-insured or lose coverage because of pre-existing conditions, that is a crisis, she said.
When an increasing percentage of the nation's children are born poor and undernourished, that, too, constitutes a crisis.
She urged the graduates to practice in underserved rural America and to provide basic care rather than pursue more lucrative specialized practices in the nation's cities.
She urged them to be more than concerned, she urged them to be ``committed,'' which she said meant willingness to give up time and treasure to the cause.
Before her speech, members of Citizens Concerned for Human Life, stood at the SPAC gateway and handed out an open letter asserting that the medical oath to be taken by the doctors mandates against abortion.
Dennis Wolterding, vice president of the Guilderland-based group, said, ``We're here because Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders is hazardous to the health of America. She's totally out of the mainstream. In fact she's so far out in the way she administers her office and in her philosophy that you couldn't find her with the Hubble telescope.''
Throughout her career, Elders has taken on tough issues and adversaries using plain, no-nonsense language. ``I don't mind being your lightning rod,'' Elders told the graduating doctors, ``as long as I know you are the thunder behind me.''
CAPTION(S):
Times Union/STEVE JACOBS RAVEEN SALUJA is hugged by her mother, Bali Saluja, before the Albany Medical College commencement at the Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center. Times Union/STEVE JACOBSU.S. SURGEON GENERAL M. Jocelyn Elders reminds graduates of AlbanyMedical College Thursday of their commitment to health care.
