I joke around about the Better Call Paul Medical Clinics but this article is a great primer on how bad things have gotten when we let corporations and VC money start buying everything. Groups are fighting this and we have talked about them before. You want to read the article, however, just to see how corrupt and politically skewed the AMA is. Here are a few highlights:
- The American Medical Association has been considering a resolution to seek a federal ban on the corporate practice of medicine at its interim House of Delegates meeting that concludes on Tuesday. The resolution, submitted by Florida emergency physician Vicki Norton, who helped compile a 70-page?white paper?on corporate medicine statutes recently released by the grassroots physician group Take Medicine Back, was almost shelved entirely after it?mysteriously landed?on a list of resolutions “not for consideration” at the meeting Saturday morning. But a physician unaffiliated with the reformers appealed the decision on behalf of an AMA subcommittee with a?brief but passionate speech?on the urgency of reversing the profession’s annexation by Wall Street investment firms.
- The AMA’s influence, however, has been in decline since the 1970s. Today, just 11 percent of licensed physicians are members—and those members are, as?The New Yorker?recently detailed in a?feature?about an unlikely campaign by young physicians and medical students to convince the association to endorse a single-payer system, much more left-leaning than they once were. One barometer of the group’s erosion in lobbying muscle is the fact that Medicare reimbursement rates have?fallen in inflation-adjusted terms 21 percent since 2001, even as health care expenditures have nearly doubled over the same period.
There’s much more in the article so give it a read and share it. And a shout out to Maureen Tkacik and Mitch Li who continue this great fight.
