Conflics of interest prevent AMA from accurately representing physicians' views

Some thoughts from Daniel Palestrant:

"...the AMA has been completely sidelined in this healthcare debate. It’s been clear that the AMA’s decisions were based more on the financial incentives that it gets from the US government as opposed to truly advocating for physicians or patients."

"Today, the AMA has reached a point where it will not publicly talk about its membership base. The most optimistic estimates say that less than one in fi ve US physicians are AMA members, but most people on the inside will tell you that there are less than 60-80,000 physicians who are actually paying AMA members.

"The AMA’s revenue in 2008 was nearly $300 million, with just about $40 million coming from membership dues (http://tinyurl.com/ye39cgf). A big chunk of the AMA’s revenue comes from its monopoly on billing codes, which is something that the government has granted them, meaning that the AMA gets a lot of money from insurance companies; and physicians as it turns out, are adamantly against those billing codes. So, to me it’s a fundamental confl ict that you could have an organization that is ostensibly advocating for physicians but is getting the majority of its money from the insurance industry."

"The physician community has been very consistent on what it wanted to see in the healthcare reform process, and yet none of those things have been achieved. The reason why the AMA wasn’t able to achieve those things is because it has no leverage. The politicians know that the AMA doesn’t really represent the physicians, and all the politicians have to do is threaten the AMA with removing its CPT license. That would make the AMA’s revenue disappear, and there are thousands of people whose jobs depend on that special arrangement with the government. Because of that fundamental confl ict, there’s no possible way the AMA can truly advocate for physicians.

"The AMA came out and endorsed the House version of the bill within, I think, 36 hours of the bill coming out (http://tinyurl.com/y939a24). In the 72 hours following that, more than 11,000 physicians logged in to Sermo and voted on whether they supported the House version of the bill, with more than 90% saying they did not. The AMA’s position was, “We’re doing these things because we think we need to have a seat at the table and we want to achieve our two primary goals,” which are malpractice tort reform and repeal of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), neither of which the AMA has been able to achieve. In the current push for healthcare reform pretty much everyone got a deal—the insurance industry, the pharma industry—yet the AMA has managed to accomplish absolutely nothing for America’s physicians."

Read the rest.

The best way to empower patients and physicians is to diminish the power of third parties.