Why I won't join the American Medical Association
by donag
Daily Kos
Sat Nov 22, 2008 at 11:17:57 AM PST
I read the 2008 AMA Reform Proposal. As a result I sent an unsolicited comment to their Member Center. I thought I would share this with you. It was longer than their 1,000 characters and couldn’t contain non-alphabeltical characters (e.g. hyperlinks), so I sent them part 1 and part 2.
Comment: Part 1. I have not joined the AMA in the past 18 years of medical practice for 3 reasons:
1. not subscribing to a single-payer/universal access health care insurance system.
2. poor ethics of the AMA in terms of receipt of outside sponsorship
3. putting the profession in a bad light with its unseemly lobbying on The Hill in concert with Big Pharma and HMOs/insurance industry.
The 2008 AMA proposal on reform is too little to late. It does not focus on universal access, affordability or quality. It is just another way of maintaining high fees for physicians who do procedures and benefits its unholy association with big pharma and HMOs/insurance industry.
Comment: Part 2: I am a local leader in healthcare and will not endorse your organization, but will continue to advocate for Physicians for a National Health Program. It is my advice to my colleagues to support that organization and not the AMA who are now one of the biggest obstructions to healthcare justice. I am unable to include hyperlinks to some excellent critiques of your Proposal on Reform in this note as you can’t include non-alphabetic characters.
I will continue to watch future AMA proposals, but it is time the AMA stopped this PR approach to their tarnished image and proposed some real healthcare reform.