On the eve of President Obama's meeting with the AMA,

[babylonsister]

I thought I'd post these articles again. Just saw a report on ABC, and they mentioned nothing about doctors who weren't on board with the AMA, nor did they mention the AMA's ties to big pharma and other for-profit enterprises. As usual, America isn't getting the full story.


http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/12/dfa-public-plan/

Rebutting AMA, Doctors Speak Out In Support Of A ‘Robust Public Option’


snip//

But some doctors have distanced themselves from the AMA’s statements. Doctors For America (DFA) — grassroots organization of doctors in all fifty states — issued a statement and hosted a conference call in support of a robust public option. Unlike the AMA, which has been steadily loosing power and currently represents “maybe 20% of physicians in this country,” DFA is “a grassroots organization” putting forth the views of “thousands of physicians” rather than “a small group of organizers.”

For these doctors, payment reform that prioritizes care quality and patient access to affordable coverage supersedes the issue of provider reimbursement. “What concerns physicians more than are they being paid enough is really what they’re being paid for,” DFA President Vivek Murthy explained:

You know, right now we have a system that rewards volume and procedures and doesn’t necessarily reward quality of care or the time that physicians take to spend with their patients. I think what’s a priority for all physicians—whether they’re a generalist, whether a specialist, whether academic physicians or private physicians—is that we restructure payment in a way that does reward quality and does reward time spent with patients, and that’s the kind of system that we’d be willing to support.


Listen at link~

Indeed, unlike a co-op or some kind of state based arrangement, a robust public option would not only drive down costs but also begin implementing payment system reforms that could help doctors deliver better care to their patients.

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http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/06/the-amas-ties-to-for-profit-health-care.php

The AMA’s Ties to For-Profit Health Care
Matthew Yglesias


I was familiar with the AMA’s general history of root-and-branch opposition to health care reform over the years. It’s no surprise, after all, that a group which once warned that Medicare would lead to totalitarianism thinks that creating a public health insurance option for non-seniors will also result in apocalypse.

What I hadn’t known until I read my colleague Lee Fang’s excellent backgrounder “A Symbiotic Relationship - The AMA And The For-Profit Health Lobby” published yesterday on the Wonk Room was the real background behind some of this. The AMA’s self-presentation is as a membership organization of doctors. But many doctors, of course, are not AMA members, and the group “inflates its numbers by giving reduced membership fees to medical school students and retirees, who make up about half of the dues payers.” More to the point, over the course of at least a century the AMA has found that it can’t rely on membership dues to generate the kind of revenue that the AMA leadership is looking for. Instead, they’ve turned to corporate sponsorship—businesses with money to make by casting a veneer of medical respectability around their pursuit of profit find a relationship with the AMA to be useful.

Lee offers this charming anecdote about the quality of the public health advice that follows from this practice:

Through the 1930s to 1950s during the tenure of AMA President Morris Fishbein, the tobacco industry leaned on the AMA to substantiate its dubious health claims. Beginning in 1933, JAMA published tobacco advertisements, stating that it had done so only “after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice.” The tobacco industry became the AMA’s largest advertiser, and its implicit endorsement of tobacco products allowed companies like Camel to proclaim slogans such as, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”


These days, fortunately, the AMA isn’t on the hook to tobacco companies for its money and it’s not into anything as deadly as touting the health benefits of cigarettes. What they are on the hook for, however, is the pharmaceutical lobby which provides at least 20 percent of the AMA’s budget. And PhRMA is in the midst of a multimillion dollar advocacy campaign against many progressive health reform ideas.

[Fovea]

1. The AMA is to the delivery of quality care

as a bowl of hot lard is to lean cuisine.

[Cha]

2. I do believe that..I've heard too many horror

stories not to.

The weird thing is how so many are against natural healing around here when the Drs depensing meds can mess you up.