What the AMA is Really About (Hint: Not Health Care)

The AMA is an old, aging, doctors' special-interest group that has shifted leftward over the years.

AMA is the factual extension of the arms of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Nothing more, nothing less.

The AMA is an old, aging, doctors' special-interest group that has shifted leftward over the years.

The AMA is mainly concerned with doctors making big bucks. Show me some doctors on food stamps or really struggling to pay off students loans.

So let’s get this straight.

We, as a society, should take the opinion of the operator of a digital ambulance chaser over the insights of the American Medical Association.

Because the AMA is not falling in line behind Obama, the demonization has begun. But to use an organization that trolls for lawsuit-happy unfortunates in order to enrich a group of smarmy lawyers is just sad.

Why would the AMA, a generations-old group of professionals who have dedicated their lives in the quest to heal the suffering of people, want to mislead as opposed to the quick-buck artist lawyers whose next jet payment depends on an outrageous class action settlement?

No thanks, I’ll look elsewhere for advice.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWExODhiYz...

Right as rain, Michael.

Thanks.

Dr. E, who's seen it from the inside.

Michael,

How is it that you are so convinced that the "public option" is the answer to the problem? I might have missed it, but I've never seen in your posts an explanation of the costs and benefits of this proposal or how it would work. Instead, your argument assumes that the "public option" is a great idea and that anyone who opposes it either doesn't care about the problem or otherwise has some ulterior motive in not allowing it to pass.

Of course, that is just the utilitarian aspect of the argument. From a legal aspect, are you even concerned that the "public option" is Constitutional. I don't seem to recall anywhere in the U.S. Constitution where it grants that kind of power to the federal government.

Perhaps this is an option that states can adopt on an individual basis. Then those states that have the best results can serve as models for other states considering to implement this proposal.

What the AMA is really about is bowing and scraping so that they can have a "place at the table" in Washington. The leadership is dominated by academics and administrative types who have no idea what running an office is like. Really all they have come out against is a mandatory public health plan, not against public health plans in general.

This is the "immoderate" AMA position that "moderate" Stickings is having a cerebral hemorage over.

the AMA supports " 'public option' alternatives that are consistent with AMA principles of pluralism, freedom of choice, freedom of practice, and universal access for patients."

I'd like to represent Webster's Dictionary in a lawsuit against Gandelman alleging malicious misuse of the English language.

"This is the 'immoderate' AMA position that 'moderate' Stickings is having a cerebral hemorage over. ..."

As I've said before, it's hardly the AMA of the 1950s. Not that the truth matters to Stickings.

If you think Stickings's lack of maturity and rationality is bad here, consider if we went in the USA to a public health system for everyone, with private duplication prohibited, and then some dissatisfied people wanted to advocate a "private option" as an alternative. He'd burst extra hard out of both ends at that.

Here's something for the intelligent to ponder, as a last word on this issue.

Consider a similar issue with the Obama people and over-ambitious liberals (to keep it kind). Here in Detroit, even people ordinarily defending the inbred idiocy with the Detroit automakers and their decades-failed business model have often expressed nervousness about the federal government's takeover of GM (and to a lesser extent, Chrysler), and even more than noting the blatant politics of the takeover details (paying off the UAW at the expense of bondholders and others with superior claims to the company's assets and future income), they fear the feds know nothing about running a company and offering good products the people will buy, they fear the failed culture will never be cured, and that the little green fascists will try to force production of too-small cars with too-expensive new features that people won't buy. (And then there is the fear that the worst of the worst in Washington will try to induce or compel people to buy these rather than what vehicles they want to buy.)

The same situation exists with health care. Even more-liberal okay-with-government organizations such as the AMA (long a doctors' labor union that has moved leftward over the years well removed from a stance of no government involvement in medicine whatsoever) fear the many possible wrongful consequences of federalization (which, despite widespread ignorance on this, isn't limited to incomes, itself an example of an Obama blunder, openly warning of a reduction in already-too-low payments).

"What the AMA is really about is bowing and scraping so that they can have a 'place at the table' in Washington."

As are the insurance companies, even though they all are simply pawns in the eyes of the elitists. And to the extent that they may be useful temporarily, but eventually not needed, their days or years are numbered. It's better to have a place at the table now and have some say now, no matter how little it will be valued, than to surrender outright from the start and simply begin being effective slaves in this process.

And the elites are ambitious as well as imperious, arrogant, and conceited as were Hillary Clinton and her people in the early 1990s. Obama is flexing his muscle overtly in telling the AMA to its face to prepare for significant reductions in already-too-low payments to its providers. How does the prospect of a future completely at the whim of people likely to make such decisions routinely make the AMA or others in the medical field feel, I wonder rhetorically? What does it truly say about people who relish such a thing?

"Because the AMA is not falling in line behind Obama, the demonization has begun."

Ha, ha, ha. While it's also an example of the triviality and neurosis commonplace on the Left, note how Fox once again is hated by going against the official leftward flow that the rest of the media follow like debris in a stream. The noteworthy issue now and for months with the media has been its puppy love and adoration for Obama and the Dems (as was predicted), and what some want to make an issue of is how Fox is somehow abnormal or excessively hostile to Obama (what a laugh that is). Meanwhile, the media right on cue are shrieking about the "health care crisis" [sic], and preparing at least one info-mercial for the Obama health care effort. (So far, we haven't heard much from Marcia Angell and Physicians for a National Health Plan, or the kiddies at American Medical Students Association, etc., but I bet Obama may enlist or exploit these fine folks and see to it the media interviews them repeatedly before too long.)

In this case of the AMA, only a few on the fringe really believe the AMA is somehow really wrong here.