Obama selects Native American woman to lead Indian Health Service

Medicine Wheel, a sacred site in Wyoming. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

President Obama's choice of Indian Health Service director signifies intent to re-authorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act which was stalled in Congress for nine years.

If President Obama gets his wish, the next director of the Indian Health Service will be a Native American woman.

Obama nominated Yvette Roubideaux, a South Dakota Rosebud Sioux tribal member, March 23, to lead the agency. If confirmed by the Senate, she will become the first Native American woman to lead the agency.

Roubideaux is an assistant professor in both the College of Public Health and College of Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, former president of the Association of American Indian Physicians, and a leader in diabetes research.  She’s also a long-term supporter of re-authorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

The bill re-authorizes the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and establishes a new national Indian health policy. Its goals are to raise the health status of Native Americans and to allow “Indians, to the greatest extent possible, to set their own health care priorities and establish goals that reflect their unmet needs.” It also includes provisions for health education scholarships. Obama co-sponsored the bill when he was in the Senate.

The bill remained stalled during the Bush presidency, even as Department of Health and Human Services and IHS officials supported the bill. Dr. Charles Grim, a member of the Cherokee Nation, served the Bush Administration for just two months in 2003. He withdrew his nomination to be director of the IHS after the White House forced him to revise his testimony that the government had a legal obligation to provide health care to Native Americans. Bush then appointed outgoing director Robert G. McSwain, a member of the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, to the post. 

A new version of the bill has yet to be introduced during the current Congress.