If you're stuck in the good old days, before all the money over health care priorities of stakeholders in the health industrial complex, you might think that the AMA as a lobbyist group for physicians is looking out for patients, or looking to first do no harm.
But, it's hard to believe. After all, the AMA is designed to work on behalf of its members, and its members are physicians, currently making bundles of money under Obamacare because, insurance payments are the best way for physicians to collect money from patients.
Now, the AMA's lobbying interests in defeating the Republican plan, and their fairly transparent worries about all those folks who won't provide them with guaranteed payment, eg insurance payments, doesn't mean that the Republican plan is good, it just means that the AMA and other stakeholder lobbyists like the insurance lobbyists of AHIP should stop playing Americans for fools.
The Huffington Post desperately tried to elevate the AMA lobby's motives, even throwing in a little Latin for the old-time and barely honored ethic of doctors, the obsolete first do no harm standard. Read a sentence further, and you'll understand why frankly, lobbyists for the medical profession are probably not the noble carriers of the torch for consumers as they worry about the unavailability of medical services for people without health insurance.
But before waxing unjustifiably sentimental, grabbing onto the AMA's words like an abused spouse focuses on the abuser saying he or she is sorry and believing it, consider a little bit of reality of what the AMA lobby has helped bring us.
The AMA has brought us physician demands that they be paid like godlike fortune tellers for discouraging people with certain life-threatening illnesses from pursuing more care, including a focus on the cost of such action in end of life "counseling". That little tidbit was an Obamacare gift to the lobby, courtesy of CMS in 2015.
And then there's forced wellness, the government-insurance company-physician combo that is the farce of insurers getting more information from you by essential benefits including tests that you're often forced to take before obtaining any treatment that actually encourages the practice of defensive medicine that protects only physicians, because the tests are given for "free," though in order to give the free tests, less coverage is available for needed medical services in the form of Obamacare's unconscionable increases in copayments, coinsurance and deductibles, meaning that if you actually NEED care, you're in a financial world of hurt.
Now, combine that piece of info with the fact that medical error is the third leading cause of death in our country AND that defensive medicine is a practice with the sole purpose of protecting physicians while exposing people to often unnecessary testing and you'd have to be pretty thick-headed to think that the AMA is worrying about first do no harm.
It may have doctor members, but the AMA is a physician lobby and as such seeks maximum bucks and preferential policies for its members. It is that hat that it's wearing when it worries about lost insurance, not people's health.
Then there's the reality that although the Huffington Post is quoting Latin and underscoring the nobility of the lobby's worries today in its pronouncement that the AMA is slamming the Republican plan, pretty obviously because it threatens the guaranteed government cash cow of Medicaid that might cut into their members' incomes, it was the same Huffington Post that noted how unimportant the AMA is when the publication joined in criticizing the AMA lobby's endorsement of Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price in December of 2016.
In that instance, the Huffington Post emphasized that "Indeed, the American Medical Association’s inclusive-sounding name doesn’t mean it represents the opinions or will of all or even most doctors," Huffington Post, 12/8/2016, Erin Schumaker, "Disappointed by the AMA, Doctors Start a New Organization to Fight Trump's Healthh Care Policies."
The noble first do no harm? Sorry, not buying it. The AMA is a lobby and it's about money for its members.
