What Drives the AMA on Health Care Reform

Yesterday I had reported here that the AMA has thrown its support in favor of one of the health care reform bills in the House.

Daniel Pamestrant, who is a physician, demonstrates why the AMA took this action:

So what does the Bill do?  For starters, it maintains the AMA’s monopoly on billing codes (known as Current Procedure Terminology or CPT codes).  As the AMA membership has shrunk to less than 15-20% of US physicians, it now earns far more money from selling those CPT codes to insurance companies than it does from membership dues.

This passage is particularly revealing.  The AMA no longer even remotely derives the major source of its revenues from membership dues. It does not represent but a relatively small minority of American physicians.  It makes huge amounts of money from selling coding guides to physician's offices and other health care-related facilities and organizations around the country.  The requirements for coding came from the federal government and Medicare, dating back, I believe, to the 1980's. 

And so, we see a cozy arrangement in which the government creates and maintains an organization's major source of support; and that organization, in turn, crawls into bed with that same government on major pieces of health care legislation.  Whether the arrangement benefits the nation as a whole is open to serious question.

Comments

[Jeffrey Sykes]

Great post Joe. This is the type of info people need to hear coming from medical practitioners.

[Joe Guarino]

Thanks, Jeff. And there is a common misconception that the AMA represents the nation's medical community. That is not true, as this post demonstrates.