INSTEAD OF NAMING A SURGEON GENERAL, WHY NOT CUT POST?

Since 1798, the U.S. government has had a hand in public health. That was the year the federal government established a health service for merchant marines, who generally suffered from poor nutrition because of their diet while at sea for long periods of time.

It wasn't until 1870, after the Civil War, that this effort was formally organized into the Marine Hospital Service, which became the Public Health Service in 1912. The Public Health Service currently is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Public Health Service oversees the Health Resources and Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, the Indian Health Service and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The operations of the Public Health Service provide government oversight of significant health issues and policies. The service is directed by an assistant secretary of health.

But there is another key official in the Public Health Service: the surgeon general, whose job is to serve as the nation's chief health adviser. The job was created in 1870, at the same time the Marine Hospital Service was formed. By and large, the post was fairly routine and certainly unglamorous until the 1950s when the government became concerned about research indicating a link between cigarette smoking and various ailments from cancer to emphysema.

It was the surgeon general, for example, who became the figurehead for the effort to put warning labels on cigarette packages and who pushed for Congress to ban cigarette advertising through television commercials.

With the rank equivalent to a vice admiral in the U.S. Navy, the surgeon general has become mostly a spokesperson for health whose profile is as high -- or as low -- as the person occupying the position. Certainly C. Everett Koop and Jocelyn Elders raised the post to unprecedented visibility in recent years. In some cases the surgeon general has become a controversial figure in a position that amounts to little more than a bully pulpit for health on behalf of the current occupant of the White House.

The post has become so politicized in recent years that the nomination of Henry Foster Jr. by President Clinton has become a critical problem for an administration that really doesn't need any more problems.

Instead of fussing over Foster as the nominee, it would make more sense to debate the need for keeping the post of surgeon general. It appears, with all the squabbling and political jockeying the nation's chief health adviser causes, that the post no longer serves any useful function that couldn't be handled just as well by any Public Health Service administrator.