^{Posted on February 8, 2008}

Thankfully, there's an alternative to the AMA

By John Warner
Op-Ed
West Virginia Gazette
February 8, 2008

I HAVE written very critically of the American Medical Association, nor am I finished with my criticism. But I will report to you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Not all physicians are enamored with the senior medical association. Today there is a younger organization, the Physicians for a National Health Program, comprising 14,000 physicians who support a plan for universal health care in America. It’s about time.

Let’s start with this. It is estimated that about 47 million Americans lack health insurance. That means they cannot cover trips to the doctor, prescriptions, dental or eye appointments. That means when they get sick, they just suck it up. Forty-seven million. Friends, that number is equal to 26 states the size of West Virginia. There is no explanation other than the severe opposition to universal health insurance provided by the American Medical Association and its Republican friends in Congress. That is a national shame.

The AMA has never campaigned for good health, although it has pretended to do so. Its stated interest throughout most of the 20th century has been such political ideals as “free enterprise” and “voluntary medicine.” The result has been a national disgrace.

The AMA has never attempted to look at medicine from the point of view of the consumer, those of us who need a doctor’s care. It has always seen medicine as a business and has argued only for good business, never good health care. What it did in the past is precisely what it is doing again in the current campaign for a new health system. The leopard does not change his spots. The result has been that we rank at the very bottom of the industrialized world in life expectancy and infant mortality.

The association has labeled all attempts at universal health care as “socialistic” and “compulsory.” Early in the Clinton administration, the president assigned his wife to redesign America’s health care. So opposed was the AMA to the plans Hillary was making that it plastered her work with bold-faced lies, telling us that under the Clinton plan we could no longer choose our own physicians, that those decisions would be made by bureaucrats in Washington, and that the AMA supported “voluntary” health care, not the “compulsory” system recommended by Bill and Hillary. That was a lie. Remember those television ads sponsored by the AMA, an attractive couple worried that they could no longer choose their own doctor? That was a lie.

In order to block health-care plans in the 1960s (Medicare and Medicaid) - and the work begun by Harry Truman before that - the AMA set up local committees of physicians to meet with their members of Congress and advise them against government-aided health care. They worked to defeat members of Congress who disagreed with them. They provided literature to be distributed in physicians’ offices warning patients against socialized medicine. They joined efforts with Readers’ Digest to flood physicians’ offices with propaganda. They provided leaflets to doctors’ wives, leaflets they could slip into every letter they mailed. Physicians put pressure on nurses in their offices to support AMA claims, while several nurses’ organizations actually supported government-supported insurance.

Here is one leaflet: “An important message from your doctor.” It claims that the Kennedy-Johnson plan would be “socialized medicine,” placing the government at your bedside, providing bureaucrats with confidential information about your health. It claims that “socialized medicine,” as practiced in European countries, was “a system which has resulted in the deterioration of medical care wherever it has been tried.”

“Working together,” the AMA argued in this doctors’ office literature, “we can preserve the high quality of health care now available in this country. Let’s keep politics out of medicine.”

What a frightful lie. American medical care is not better than our European friends’ care. Ask those 47 million Americans who live on the edge of disaster, who lack health coverage, for whom a health crisis means economic ruin.

Today, realizing that the health-care die is being cast and recognizing that the next Congress, a Democratic Congress, will pass new health-care legislation, the AMA has proposed what it calls the “Voice of the Uninsured.”

In August 2007, just last summer, AMA president-elect Nancy Nielson announced the new AMA health-care plan. “Under the AMA plan, the vast majority of Americans would have the means to purchase health-care coverage,” she said. “It would give individuals choices, so they can select the appropriate coverage for them and their families, and would promote market reform in the insurance industry.” Friends, that is a lie.

I said above that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The younger organization, Physicians for a National Health Program, denounced the claims made by Ms. Nielson, saying: “What the AMA isn’t saying is that its plan would steer about 47 million people into the health insurance industry’s most expensive form of coverage. And it would probably leave taxpayers holding the bag.”

“It’s a flawed plan because it’s the most expensive way that we could extend health coverage to everyone,” reports a representative for the Physicians for a National Health Program. Thank heavens for the PNHP. They are on our side.

Warner, professor emeritus at West Virginia Wesleyan College, is a Gazette contributing columnist. This is the last of three essays on medical care.